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The Welland Canal is a ship canal in Ontario, Canada, connecting Lake Ontario and Lake Erie. Traversing the Niagara Peninsula from Port Weller to Port Colborne, the canal forms a key section of the St. Lawrence Seaway, enabling ships to ascend and descend the Niagara Escarpment and bypass Niagara Falls. Approximately 40,000,000 tonnes of cargo are carried through the Welland Canal annually by a traffic of about 3,000 ocean and Great Lakes vessels. This canal was a major factor in the growth of the city of Toronto. The original canal and its successors allowed goods from Great Lakes ports such as Cleveland, Detroit, and Chicago, as well as heavily industrialized areas of the United States and Ontario, to be shipped to the port of Montreal or to Quebec City, where they were usually reloaded onto ocean-going vessels for international shipping. By providing a relatively short and direct connection to Lake Erie, the Welland Canal eclipsed other, narrower canals in the region as a commercial traffic route for Great Lakes navigation, such as the Trent-Severn Waterway and, significantly, the Erie Canal, which linked the Atlantic and Lake Erie via New York City and Buffalo, New York. The southern, Lake Erie terminus of the canal is higher than the northern terminus on Lake Ontario. The canal includes eight -wide ship locks.〔(【引用サイトリンク】format=Pdf )〕 Seven of the locks (Locks 1–7, the 'Lift' locks) are long and raise (or lower) passing ships by between 43 (13.01 m) and each. The southernmost lock, (Lock 8 – the 'Guard' or 'Control' lock) is in length.〔(【引用サイトリンク】title=The Welland Canal - Navigation, Locks, Distances, and Passage Information )〕 The Garden City Skyway passes over the canal, restricting the maximum height of the masts of the ships allowed on this canal to . All other highway or railroad crossings of the Welland Canal are either movable bridges (of the vertical lift or bascule bridge types) or subterranean tunnels. The maximum permissible length of a ship in this canal is . It takes ships an average of about eleven hours to traverse the entire length of the Welland Canal. ==History== Before the digging of the Welland Canal, shipping traffic between Lake Ontario and Lake Erie used a portage road between Chippawa, Ontario, and Queenston, Ontario, both of which are located on the Niagara River—above and below Niagara Falls, respectively. 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Welland Canal」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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