Locks · Ohio River
Belleville Locks and Dam: big tows, short waits
The median tow here pushed 12 barges and still started locking within half an hour.
Belleville Locks and Dam sits at mile 203.9 of the Ohio River, at Reedsville, Ohio. Between 4 September and 4 October 2026, 336 commercial tows locked through with 3,395 barges. Only six of the 173 locks with traffic in our archive moved more barges. The median tow waited 28 minutes from arrival to the start of its lockage.
A chamber that fits the tow
The lock has two chambers. The larger is 1,200 by 110 feet, with a 22-foot lift. The median commercial tow pushed 12 barges and the largest pushed 16. A standard jumbo hopper barge is 195 by 35 feet, so 12 of them, three wide and four long, cover about 780 by 105 feet. That fits in the chamber in a single cut, with no split.
Most tows barely wait
64% of commercial tows began locking within an hour of arrival. One in ten waited longer than 2.4 hours, and 2% waited more than twelve. Weekly median waits stayed between 13 and 50 minutes in all five weeks. Across all 336 commercial lockages, tows spent 411 hours waiting, about 17 days in total.
The longest wait we recorded was 26 hours: the downbound D A Grimm, pushing 15 barges for Superior Marine Ways, arrived on 4 September and began locking the next day.
Who locks through
| Operator | Lockages | Barges | Hours waited |
|---|---|---|---|
| Crounse | 32 | 408 | 28 |
| Hardin Street Marine | 30 | 161 | 28 |
| Amherst Madison | 29 | 327 | 39 |
| Kirby Inland Marine | 23 | 143 | 34 |
| Hines Furlong Line | 16 | 211 | 24 |
27% of commercial lockages carried a hazardous-cargo flag. Recreational and light boats made up 9% of all 371 lockages. Traffic averaged 12 lockages a day and peaked at 22 on 6 September.
Between Racine and Willow Island
Racine Locks and Dam is the next lock upstream and Willow Island Locks and Dam the next downstream.
At 10:06 UTC on 5 October the Corps reported no tows waiting at Belleville, with three upbound and three downbound lockages in the previous 24 hours. The live Belleville Locks and Dam page updates every 15 minutes.
Related
Sources: U.S. Army Corps of Engineers Lock Performance Monitoring System, archived by Lock Wait; chamber dimensions and opening year from the BTS National Transportation Atlas; operators from the USACE Waterborne Transportation Lines (2022) and FCC ship licences. Wait is measured from arrival to start of lockage. How every number is defined.