Tenn-Tom waterway

This is a cotton field that we saw along the road when we drove to Nashville. 











We went to a visitor center along the waterway.  Here are some of the pictures and facts we gathered on our visit.



Tennessee-Tombigbee Waterway is where we are traveling now. This waterway is man made and is 234 miles long from Yellow Creek, Tennessee to Demopolis, Alabama. It has 10 locks along the waterway. The first lock is the Jamie Whitten Lock and it is 84 feet deep.



There are 3 sections to the waterway; they are the divide section, the canal section, and the river section. This waterway is called the Tenn-Tom. The name Tombigbee came from two Indian names. The Choctaw Indians called the river “Itomba Igaby”, roughly translated as box (or coffin) maker. The initial “I” on each word was not emphasized in the Choctaw dialect; hence the French settlers called it Tombeckbee.



The total lift of the Tenn-Tom is 341 feet from one end to the other and is more than 3 ½ times that of the Panama Canal. It took 12 years to build the Waterway, from December 1972 until December 1984. It cost over $2 Billion dollars and took more than 25 million man-hours.



This waterway saves users and companies over 800 miles between the Tennessee River and the Gulf of Mexico and saves them $130,000,000 annually. The average 8 barge tow can move as much freight as 120 rail cars or 480 tractor trailer trucks. That is a lot of material! It also can move over a ton of freight twice as far as a train and 6 times as far as a tractor-trailer on the same amount of fuel. It is efficient also.



It takes 46 million gallons of water to fill the Whitten Lock while the average lock holds about 14 million gallons. It takes on average 12 to 16 minutes to fill or empty the lock.





 



This is a model replica of one of the paddle wheelers.

This is a tow boat and barge that is inside the lock (84 feet).  We were standing on the access road by the lock.  The tow and barge disappeared as the water went down in the lock.

This is the sign board along the waterway.