5/2/2023 0 Comments Neptunes staircaseIt is the longest staircase lock in Britain, lifting boats 64 feet (20 m). The canal finally flows into Lake Erie at lock 8 in Port Colborne where the old and new canals lie side by side.Neptune’s Staircase at Banavie, near Fort William just north of Loch Linnhe, is kept by Scottish Canals. The Parkway continues south of Glendale Ave where it passes the flight locks and leads to another viewing centre at Lock 7 at the south end of the Parkway. It is located on the Welland Canal Parkway south of Queenston Street. This spacious facility also offers washrooms, a gift shop, and an elevator to the viewing platform. Although the twin-flight locks lack a designated viewing site, the Lock 3 canal interpretative centre offers visitors a canal museum and a three-level viewing platform from which to watch the ships creep through the lock with only a few centimetres to spare on either side. The lock areas themselves are off limits, but a canal side road and trail allow visitors to pause and watch the passing of the ships as they inch into and out of the locks, often with less than a metre to spare on either side. Yet incredibly, the entire process requires only 10 minutes per lock. Over a stretch of 1,250 metres, the twin-flight locks lift or lower enormous ships by almost 43 metres, each operation requiring the draining and filling of more than 91 million litres of water. As the locks, four, five and six, feed into each other like a flight of stairs, they have also been twinned to allow vessels to pass through in each direction at the same time. That did not occur until the fourth version of the canal opened to traffic in 1932, when a mere eight locks operated through the entire length - three at the cliff face itself.Īs with the earlier structures, those three today are an engineering marvel. Although the third canal, completed in 1887, succeeded in widening and deepening the locks, it failed to reduce the number required to climb the cliff. But again, a dozen locks were still needed to reach the lime- stone summit. Because of the step- like appearance of this series of locks, they earned the nickname “Neptune’s Staircase.”įifteen years later, a second canal replaced the narrow wooden locks of the first, reducing the number of locks from forty to twenty-seven. In the first version of the canal, of the forty locks, more than half were needed to climb the escarpment alone. There was now all-Canadian alternative to the Erie Canal was bringing ships from Lake Ontario to Lake Erie.īut while construction between Lake Ontario and the Niagara Escarpment and from the top of the escarpment to Lake Erie was relatively straightforward, the problem lay with the 100-metre limestone cliff that formed the face of the escarpment. By 1828, Merritt’s canal opened between Port Dalhousie on Lake Ontario and Port Colborne on Lake Erie. It was evident to William Hamilton Merritt that an all-Canadian canal was needed if Canadians were not to be forced to rely on their southern neighbour. The only all-Canadian route from the ocean to Lake Erie was through the rapids-strewn St. When the Erie Canal opened in 1826, it ran through New York state and linked Lake Erie with New York and the Atlantic Ocean. But like you, we dream of travelling again, and are publishing these stories with future trips in mind. We understand the restrictions on travel during the coronavirus pandemic.
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