Locks · Ohio River
Markland Locks and Dam: one lockage in five carries no barges
Pleasure boats, light towboats and government vessels made 21% of the lockages here. The busiest day was Labor Day.
Markland Locks and Dam sits at mile 531.5 of the Ohio River, at Warsaw, Kentucky. Between 4 September and 4 October 2026 it handled 401 lockages. 83 of them, 21%, carried no barges. Those are recreational boats, light towboats and government vessels. The other 318 were commercial tows.
Labor Day was the busiest day
The lock averaged 12.9 lockages a day. The busiest was Monday 7 September, Labor Day, with 20. Across the whole period, Saturday was the busiest day of the week and 10 a.m. the busiest hour.
Tows barely wait
The median commercial tow waited 0.3 hours, about 18 minutes, from arrival to the start of its lockage. That ranks 46th of the 173 locks with traffic in our archive. 27% of tows waited more than an hour. One in ten waited longer than 1.9 hours, and none waited twelve. The longest wait was 7.4 hours: the downbound Capt Kirby Dupuis, pushing 15 barges, arrived on 1 October.
The lock has two chambers. The main one is 1,200 by 110 feet, with a 35-foot lift, and opened in 1959. The median tow pushed 11 barges, and the lock passed 3,064 barges in all, 14th of 173.
| Operator | Lockages | Hours waited |
|---|---|---|
| Ingram Barge | 46 | 35 |
| Crounse | 46 | 44 |
| Hardin Street Marine | 32 | 23 |
| Amherst Madison | 21 | 19 |
What the lock reports now
The lockmaster's notice lists missing mooring pins: the 1,200-foot pin on the main chamber's river wall, the 25-foot pin on the auxiliary chamber's middle wall, and a 1,000-foot river-wall pin stuck midway. At the last status report, early on 5 October, one tow was waiting and the Corps' own four-hour average delay was 75 minutes. That figure is the Corps' measure, not ours, and it peaked at 123 minutes since live status began on 4 October. The live Markland 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.