Capacity Studies of Winfield Locks, Kanawha River, West Virginia.

The Winfield lockage facilities currently consist of two 360-ft x 56-ft chambers with a normal lift of 28 ft. With the increasing traffic on the Kanawha River, these facilities are no longer adequate to serve the towing industry using this portion of the inland waterway system. Excessive delays now occur at Winfield and if the predicted traffic growth materializes during the next 10 or 15 years without action being taken by the Corps to address the problem, transfers of traffic movements to other more costly modes of transportation will result. Accordingly, studies were conducted to determine the capacity of the existing lockage facilities and to evaluate possible solutions for increasing this capacity through the use of alternative operating policies and rules that have been considered to be beneficial at other lock sites. Using the two simulation models, TOWGEN and WATSIM IV, the following four alternative operating policies were simulated to determine their respective effects on the capacity of Winfield and the delays to be expected should such policies be possible--a. first In-First Out FIFO Unrestricted b. FIFO Unrestricted with a 10 percent reduction in lockage component timesc FIFO Ready-to-Serve and d 3 Up-3 Down, Unrestricted. These operating policies are discussed in detail in the report. Input data for the models were collected through the Performance Monitoring System PMS of the Inland Navigation Systems Analysis INSA program.