Waterford Flight
set of locks on the Erie Canal in upstate New York, USA
The Waterford Flight is a set of locks on the Erie Canal in Waterford, New York. Erie Canal Locks E-2 through E-6 make up the combined flight at Waterford, which lifts vessels from the Hudson River to the Mohawk River, bypassing Cohoes Falls. Built in 1915, the Waterford Flight is still in use today as part of the New York State Canal System, which is open to public and commercial traffic. The Waterford Flight is the series of locks with the highest elevation gain (169 feet (52 m)) relative to its length (1.5 miles (2.4 km)) for any canal lock system in the United States.
Planning
The original route of the Erie Canal bypassed Cohoes Falls to the south through the city of Cohoes. At the turn of the century, plans for an enlarged Erie Canal were being drawn up to accommodate more traffic and larger vessels. However, instead of constructing canals from scratch like had been done previously, the plan proposed "canalizing" the local rivers. For the plan near Cohoes, it involved routing a channel from the Mohawk River north of Cohoes Falls directly to the Hudson River at Waterford. Traffic would then flow directly from the Hudson to the Mohawk via the Waterford Flight and completely bypass the old canals from Albany to Cohoes. The Troy Federal Lock and Dam would serve as the unofficial start of the Erie Canal, with the first lock of the Waterford Flight being the official beginning, hence it being named E-2 to this day.
“Waterford Flight” enters the record as set of locks on the Erie Canal in upstate New York, USA. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Waterford, Flight and locks can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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This entry incorporates text from “Waterford Flight” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.