The Peterborough Hydraulic Lift Lock

This is the World's highest Lift lock!  It lifts you 65 feet.  The construction cost was twice what a flight of locks would have cost but the time going through it is about 8 minutes compared to a set of locks taking about 1.5 hours. 

It was made at a time before reinforced concrete was used! Started in 1896, it finally opened in 1904 and is now over 100 years old... same structure.  The tie up in this lock is different than all other locks... you tie up on horizontal bars and you can secure it and not have to watch your line until the last few minutes.  So.. there we both were standing on the bow of our boat with three other boats in the “pan” with us. Walter lets them all know that, “This is not reinforced concrete”... some did not want to hear this!? Then our “pan” which is the enclosed shallow (7ft deep) body of water that we are sitting in, starts shaking!  Then we see the huge black round hydraulic cylinder across from us and under the other pan.  It starts bringing that pan down as we begin to rise up. My Captain who is also an engineer who rarely ever shows any concern/worry turns to me and says, “This is scary”! Yikes!

Here we are approaching the Peterborough Lift Lock. 

Two boats ahead of us entering the Lift Lock.  Then we entered behind boat on right.

In these two photos you are looking first at the back end of the upper pan coming down and the front end of same pan.  

This is the Hydraulic Pipe or Ram (large round black pipe) under the other pan. 

Back view of our pan in the back just behind our boat/dinghy as we are about at the top. 

Here is our pan or “Lock Chamber” at the top just after all 4 boats have exited it.

Pan on right going down and Pan on left going up with a small boat near edge... hard to see.

One pan almost on bottom, other at top. 

How it works diagram. 

We spent a good bit of our day at this lock going through the museum. It was fascinating to see all the photographs of the building of this Hydraulic system.

We did see other sights like this pretty yard.

Canal Traffic. :-) 

We are at a lock wall tonight at Lakefield.

I have to tell you that the first mate jumped off the boat twice today to tie it up when no one was around to catch our lines.  And the docking walls were not high either.... I just did what I have seen Walter do... put my foot in the long slit on the side of Miss gg below the deck that is an air intake for cooling the engines.  Once it was fairly high and I got nervous but I leaped anyway. Then when we pulled into this nice shady place I actually lassoed the dock cleat and tied the bow tight. WAHOO!!  Of course I think my back will feel this tomorrow but it was exciting to know I could do this to help out the Captain!