Montgomery Locks and Dam New River Chamber, Ohio River

Montgomery has been running commercial traffic through an auxiliary chamber that is too small for a modern tow since 1936. At 56 feet by 360 feet, it forces double lockages on almost everything that moves. The Corps of Engineers Pittsburgh District is replacing it with a 110-by-600-foot chamber, and a joint venture of two Pittsburgh contractors, Trumbull Corporation and Brayman Construction, holds the $769.9 million base contract.

Project Scope

The new chamber goes in at Ohio River Mile 31.7 near Monaca, about 30 river miles below Pittsburgh. Trumbull-Brayman beat one other bidder for the base package, announced December 10, 2024. Field offices are complete, the access road is paved, and the auxiliary chamber has been partially removed. The 2026 work centers on standing up an on-site concrete batch plant, which is the item that governs everything downstream of it on a mass-concrete job this size. Total project cost is roughly $1.6 billion, with $961 million coming from the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law.

Why It Matters

Montgomery is the first component of the Upper Ohio Navigation Project, which also replaces the undersized chambers at Emsworth and Dashields. Those three structures sit between the Port of Pittsburgh and the rest of the inland system, and all three date to the 1920s and 1930s. Until they’re rebuilt, the reliability of the entire upper Ohio depends on machinery older than the interstate highway system.

The Corps projects more than 13,000 construction jobs across the program. That number gets quoted a lot, but the more useful figure for contractors is the sequencing: Montgomery runs to 2033, and Emsworth and Dashields follow it. Western Pennsylvania’s heavy-civil market has close to a decade of federally funded lock work in front of it, which is the kind of visibility that justifies buying equipment and building a crew rather than chasing one job at a time.

Project Team & Details