The Welland Canal — Complete Guide

Lake Erie sits 99.5 metres above Lake Ontario. Niagara Falls — the natural barrier between the two — is spectacular but impassable for ships. From the earliest days of settlement, the inability to move goods between the lakes was a major economic problem.

William Hamilton Merritt, a St. Catharines merchant, championed the first Welland Canal. Construction began in 1824 and the canal opened in 1829 — a hand-dug, 40km channel with 40 wooden locks. It was immediately profitable. The commercial advantage for Upper Canada over American ports was enormous.

Three subsequent canals replaced the original — in 1845, 1887, and 1932. The current (fourth) canal is 42km long, 8.5m deep, and handles ships up to 225m long. It is the busiest commercial waterway in Canada.

The canal lifts ships 99.5 metres through 8 locks (7 in the main canal plus the Guard Lock at Port Colborne). Each standard lock is 233.5m long and 24.4m wide — large enough for a Seaway-class freighter carrying 30,000 tonnes of cargo.

The process is surprisingly simple: a ship enters the lock chamber, gates close behind it, and water is either pumped in (going up, toward Lake Erie) or drained out (going down, toward Lake Ontario). The ship rises or falls on the water level change. Each lock takes approximately 10 minutes. A full transit of the canal takes about 11 hours.

Lock 3 at St. Catharines is the most accessible for visitors — the Welland Canal Museum and viewing platform are free, and ships pass frequently during shipping season (late March to late December). The best viewing times are weekday mornings.

Approximately 3,000 vessel transits per year carry 40 million tonnes of cargo through the canal. The primary commodities are grain (wheat, corn, soybeans) moving eastward toward ocean ports, and iron ore, coal, and limestone moving westward to steel mills in Hamilton and Gary, Indiana.

Ocean-going vessels — called "salties" — transit the canal regularly. A typical saltie might have loaded grain in Thunder Bay, transited the locks, and is now headed to Rotterdam. Watching a 200m ship slide past you at eye level, separated by 3 metres of water, is a genuinely startling experience.

Shipping season runs from the last week of March to the last week of December. The canal closes during winter due to ice. Watching the last ship of the season transit Lock 3 in December has become a local tradition.

The first three canals were progressively replaced but not entirely demolished. You can still see original stonework from the 1829 and 1845 canals in Port Dalhousie (the northern terminus), at Merritt Island in Welland, and in Thorold.

The Welland Canal Waterway Park in St. Catharines follows the old canal route through an urban greenway. The remains of Locks 1 and 2 from the 1829 canal are preserved in Port Dalhousie's Lakeside Park — walk past the carousel to the old lock cut and you can see the original stonework from 200 years ago.

The Welland Museum at Lock 3 has an excellent scale model of the entire canal system and a working model lock chamber. Free on Sundays.