Locks · Tennessee River
Kentucky Lock: why tows wait four days
The typical commercial tow waited 99 hours here. No other federal lock comes close.
Kentucky Lock sits at mile 22.4 of the Tennessee River, at Grand Rivers, Kentucky. Between 31 August and 4 October 2026, 205 commercial tows locked through. The median one had waited 99 hours, just over four days, from arrival to the start of its lockage. That is the longest median wait of the 173 locks with traffic in our archive.
Nearly every tow waits
98% of commercial tows waited more than an hour, and 93% waited more than twelve. One in ten waited longer than 155 hours. The longest wait we recorded was 205 hours: the upbound Jvessco 1, pushing 14 barges, arrived on 16 September and began locking eight and a half days later.
One chamber, built in 1942
The lock has a single chamber, 600 by 110 feet, with a 57-foot lift. The median commercial tow here pushed 12 barges. A tow that size is longer than the chamber, so it has to be split and locked through in more than one cut. Every split adds chamber time, and every tow behind it waits longer.
Who waits
| Operator | Lockages | Hours waited |
|---|---|---|
| Ingram Barge | 49 | 5,090 |
| Hardin Street Marine | 18 | 1,680 |
| Hines Furlong Line | 14 | 1,366 |
| Kirby Inland Marine | 10 | 1,162 |
Across all 205 commercial lockages, tows spent 20,420 hours waiting, about 851 days in five weeks. 31% carried a hazardous-cargo flag.
The last week looks better than it was
Weekly median waits ran between 94 and 121 hours through September, then fell to 19 hours in the week ending 4 October. Do not read that as relief. A tow that arrived late in the week and was still waiting when we collected the data has no lockage yet, so it is missing from the count. The longest waits are always the last to appear. The live Kentucky Lock page will show whether the drop holds.
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.