E4 Waterford
Waterford · Mile 1.60 · Operated by NYS Canal Corporation
Barge Canal · 1918 — the Waterford Flight, lifting boats from the Hudson tidewater up to the canalized Mohawk River. Not the hand-dug canal of 1825. Which canal is this? →
History
Lock E4 sits at the heart of the Waterford Flight, matching E3 with a 34.5-foot lift — one of the two biggest steps on the stair. By the time a westbound boat clears E4 it has already risen more than a hundred feet above the Hudson in under a mile of travel. These are among the deepest lock chambers on the canal, the result of a deliberate choice by the Barge Canal’s engineers in the early 1900s: climb the valley wall in five long strides rather than a dozen short ones. It opened with the rest of the flight in 1915, and it has been doing the same steep work, day after boating-season day, ever since.