Independent. Built from Canal & River Trust's own published notices, with no affiliation to or endorsement by the Trust.
The archive / Old Main Line
Old Main Line
10.6 closure-days per kilometre (95% range 9.3–12.0) — 233 days across 10 closures of this 22km canal.
Lengths from CRT's ArcGIS open data, published under the strictest reading of its licence. A notice is attributed to the whole named waterway, not to a point.
Something was shut here on 30% of this cruising season — 69 of its 231 days — across 4 separate closures.
That means a closure somewhere on the canal, not that the whole canal was impassable. Every closure below names the locks or bridges it sat between.
Nothing is shut on this canal today.
- Regions
- West Midlands
- On record
- 11 closures
The season, closure by closure
Each row is one closure. A bar starts and ends where the closure did, and its length is how long it ran; dashed bars have not started yet.
Every closure on record
Showing all 10 closures on the Old Main Line.
What these figures mean
- Population
- Which closures a figure counts. All closures is everything; Unplanned, in season drops CRT's scheduled winter programme and any day outside the 15 March to 31 October cruising season; CRT winter programme is that maintenance alone.
- Defensible duration
- The days between a closure's start and its reopening date, counted only where the dates allow it. A cancelled notice, or one whose reopening precedes its start, has no defensible duration and is in no total.
- Closure-days
- One day on which one closure was in force. Two closures on the same day are two closure-days; where the question is how long a canal was actually disrupted, overlapping notices are unioned into single intervals.
| Notice | Extent | Started | Days |
|---|---|---|---|
| Wolverhampton Lock Flight | Lock 21, Wolverhampton to Wolverhampton Top Lock | 2026-07-19 | 59 |
| Wolverhampton Lock Flight | Lock 21, Wolverhampton to Wolverhampton Top Lock | 2025-07-30 | 47 |
| Smethwick Locks, Birmingham | Lock 1, Smethwick to Lock 3, Smethwick | 2026-07-19 | 47 |
| Smethwick Lock Flight | Lock 1, Smethwick to Lock 3, Smethwick | 2025-08-08 | 38 |
| Lock 1, Wolverhampton | Lock 21, Wolverhampton to Lock 1, Top Lock, Wolverhampton | 2025-11-24 | 25 |
| Wolverhampton Lock Flight, Old Main Line | Lock 21, Wolverhampton to Lock 1, Top Lock, Wolverhampton | 2025-06-05 | 8 |
| Wolverhampton Lock Flight | Lock 21, Wolverhampton to Lock 1, Top Lock, Wolverhampton | 2026-06-18 | 5 |
| Wolverhampton Lock Flight | Lock 21, Wolverhampton to Wolverhampton Top Lock | 2026-01-13 | 2 |
| Wolverhampton Lock 16 to Lock 17 | Lock 17, Wolverhampton to Lock 16, Wolverhampton | 2026-03-21 | 2 |
| Lock 12, Old Main Line | Lock 12, Wolverhampton | 2025-07-02 | same day |
Showing the 10 longest of 10. Every row links to the notice CRT published.
Coming up
Scheduled but not yet started, so in no figure above.
| Closure | From | Planned |
|---|---|---|
| Lock 11, Wolverhampton | 4 January 2027 | 18 days |
Not counted
Cancelled notices and ones whose dates cannot be right are in no figure on this page. They are kept here because CRT published them.
| Notice | State | Started |
|---|---|---|
| Wolverhampton Lock Flight | Cancelled | 20 February 2026 |
| Lock 11, Wolverhampton | Published | 4 January 2027 |