A Big Wheel

• Challenges

Guillotine lock

We have just come back up the river Nene. There are 36 locks between Peterborough and  Northampton and they are all big. Because of the issues with flooding along the river, almost all of them have “guillotine” gates at one end. These are large and heavy metal panels.

The wheel

Fortunately most of these are electrified and it just involves pushing buttons – and waiting for a very slow mechanism. Unfortunately, not all are powered though. Those that aren’t have a rather large wheel that you have to spin to wind the gate up and down.

It takes at least a hundred spins of this wheel, to move the gate either up or down. On top of that, the rules of operation are that the gate is always up when you get to the lock, so you have to first put it down, fill the lock and then put it up again to empty it before you move on. It is very slow and hard work:

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