A boat lift, ship lift, or lift lock is a machine for transporting boats between water at two different elevations, and is an alternative to the
canal lock
A lock is a device used for raising and lowering boats, ships and other watercraft between stretches of water of different levels on river and canal waterways. The distinguishing feature of a lock is a fixed chamber in which the water lev ...
.
It may be vertically moving, like the
Anderton boat lift in
England, rotational, like the
Falkirk Wheel in
Scotland, or operate on an
inclined plane, like the
Ronquières inclined plane
The Ronquières Inclined Plane is a Belgian canal inclined plane on the Brussels-Charleroi Canal in the province of Hainaut in Wallonia that opened in April 1968 after six years of construction. It is in the municipality of Braine-le-Comte and tak ...
in
Belgium.
History
A precursor to the canal boat lift, able to move full-sized canal boats, was the
tub boat lift used in mining, able to raise and lower the 2.5 ton
tub boat
A tub boat was a type of unpowered cargo boat used on a number of the early English and German canals. The English boats were typically long and wide and generally carried to of cargo, though some extra deep ones could carry up to . They a ...
s then in use. An experimental system was in use on the
Churprinz mining canal in
Halsbrücke near
Dresden. It lifted boats using a moveable hoist rather than
caissons. The lift operated between 1789 and 1868,
[Charles Hadfield ''World Canals: Inland Navigation Past and Present'', p. 71, ] and for a period of time after its opening engineer
James Green reporting that five had been built between 1796 and 1830. He credited the invention to
Dr James Anderson of Edinburgh.
[The Canals of Southwest England ''Charles Hadfield'', p. 104, ]
The idea of a boat lift for canals can be traced back to a design based on balanced water-filled caissons in
Erasmus Darwin
Erasmus Robert Darwin (12 December 173118 April 1802) was an English physician. One of the key thinkers of the Midlands Enlightenment, he was also a natural philosopher, physiologist, slave-trade abolitionist, inventor, and poet.
His poems ...
's Commonplace Book (pp. 58–59) dated 1777–1778
In 1796 an experimental
balance lock was designed by
James Fussell and constructed at Mells on the
Dorset and Somerset Canal, though this project was never completed.
A similar design was used for lifts on the
tub boat
A tub boat was a type of unpowered cargo boat used on a number of the early English and German canals. The English boats were typically long and wide and generally carried to of cargo, though some extra deep ones could carry up to . They a ...
section of the
Grand Western Canal entered into operation in 1835 becoming the first non-experimental boat lifts in Britain
[The Canals of Southwest England ''Charles Hadfield'', p. 109, ] and pre-dating the
Anderton Boat Lift by 40 years.
In 1904 the
Peterborough Lift Lock designed by
Richard Birdsall Rogers opened in Canada. This high lift system is operated by gravity alone, with the upper bay of the two bay system loaded with an additional of water as to give it greater weight.
Before the construction of the Three Gorges Dam Ship Lift, the highest boat lift, with a height difference and European Class IV (1350 tonne) capacity, was the
Strépy-Thieu boat lift
The Strépy-Thieu boat lift (french: L'ascenseur funiculaire de Strépy-Thieu) lies on a branch of the Canal du Centre in the municipality of Le Rœulx, Hainaut, Belgium. With a height difference of between the upstream and downstream reache ...
in Belgium opened in 2002.
The ship lift at the
Three Gorges Dam, completed in January 2016, is high and able to lift vessels of up to 3,000 tons displacement.
The boat lift at
Longtan is reported to be even higher in total with a maximum vertical lift of in two stages when completed.
Selected lift locks
See also
*
List of boat lifts This list includes all types of constructions to lift or lower boats between two levels of a waterway, such as boat lifts, canal inclined planes, portage railways and water slopes, but excluding conventional locks.
Belgium
* Canal du Centre lift ...
*
Lock (water transport)
*
Balance lock
*
Canal inclined plane – another technique for lifting boats.
*
Caisson lock: a submerged boat lift.
*
Shiplift – used for raising vessels in shipyards
*
Marine railway inclined plane for shipyards
*
Water slope
*
Saint-Louis-Arzviller boat lift
The Saint-Louis-Arzviller inclined plane is an inclined plane on the Marne-Rhine Canal (french: Canal de la Marne au Rhin) that enables the canal to cross the Vosges Mountains. It is located in the commune of Saint-Louis, between the towns of ...
, France – which is actually a
canal inclined plane
*
Portable boat lift
A portable boat lift is a tool designed specifically to allow one person to transport, set up, and safely separate boats from boat trailers. Portable boat lifts are intended to be used on land, rather than near, in, or on the water. Sometimes refe ...
*
Patent slip
References
Further reading
*
*
External links
*
Source mentions its own sources
The International Canal Monuments List*
– in fact an inclined plane
Twin Ship Elevator Lüneburg– Technical data of the
Scharnebeck twin ship lift
The Scharnebeck twin ship lift is a boat lift in Scharnebeck, northeast of Lüneburg, in the District of Lüneburg, Lower Saxony, Germany. It is on the Elbe Lateral Canal, which connects the Elbe (northern and lower endpoint, at Artlenburg) and ...
near
Lüneburg,
Germany
Dutch boat lift page
{{DEFAULTSORT:Boat Lift
Vertical transport devices