1000 axles sounds doable, but maybe not very practical.

Rail based mobile fortresses with hundreds of powered axles are a totally normal thing in this setting.

All it took was a new ice age & railway comapnies taking over what remained from human kind and banning all non-rail based vehicles.

End result - no cars, tanks, airplanes, ships (well, nowhere to use those anyway), with everything on rails. :-)

'Just dig a trench and fill it with seawater'. Starts to sound an awful lot like a canal to me ... and ... why do you need a train to pull this?

Apparently some Australian ore trains are 43,000 tonnes (24000 tonnes of ore), according to Wikipedia (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Longest_trains) so we are within an order of magnitude

Union Pacific (main freight carrier in Southern California) gives 286,000 lbs, ~ 140 tons https://www.up.com/aboutup/reference/maps/allowable_gross_we...

In all likelihood, the terrain is the bottleneck here.

Joke aside... RoRo has much quicker transfer but ship capacities are much smaller.

Assuming 190 trains per direction, on a 24h/day schedule, that's 8 trains per hour, per direction. Or a 7.5 min block between trains 24 hours a day. That doesn't seem very realistic..

That transloading often happens anyway eventually.

And injecting some straight into the local railway network.

And running larger than Panamax ships on either side.

But for the Jones act. Ask Puerto Rico, Alaska and Hawaii why everything is so expensive!

https://www.cato.org/blog/jones-acts-role-encouraging-puerto...

60% of all canal traffic is US containers.

Look at some place North Carolina... 1000 calls a year. There is rail, truck and warehouse infrastructure to support that. It is highly optimized because of domestic transit by rail and truck, of imports and exports.

If you optimize your profit, by dropping imports closer to the point of consumption any extra profit you make will be consumed by rail and trucks getting exports to you in a non optimal way.

The smart choice is to sail to the port where the exports are. But because you can't take that domestic cargo you going in a non optimal state... that empty transit time just cost you money because you have a 2nd captain, crew, ship, insurance and moving an empty vessel is waste!

Basicity the limits the jones act imposes means that you can't fully optimize against the cost and structure of domestic transit.

Iceland Airlines kinda does the same shuffle for transatlantic flights and self-loading freight ;)

But running the numbers on it, you really can't compete on throughput, what with the truly massive capacity of cargo ships. Like, even if it had only 3000 conatiners, it only has to go at 1/1500th of the rail speed (assuming you can stack them two-high) to beat it. This page[1] says panamaxes have traditionally held 5000, with "New Panamax"es carrying 13,000.

(Edit: ChatGPT tells me that transit of the canal takes 10 hours on the high side, and it's 82 km long, so that's an effective ship speed of 8.2 km per hour, meaning the rail would have to go 20,000 km/h to compete on throughput.)

But yeah, the other advantages you mention would apply.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panamax?useskin=vector#Cargo_c...

What's perhaps more reasonable is to replace it with maybe 20 trains. You could maybe run such trains on a 10-minute headway, so 6 trains an hour, so 3 1/3 hours.

That's to replace one ship.

But it's also if you only have a single track rail line. You could build N parallel tracks along the same route. (This is far more reasonable than trying to build something where you can stack the containers 10 high or something, and then wide enough that it would be stable, and then you have to worry about the load-bearing ability of the track.)

But even if you build all those tracks, then you have the problem of unloading the ship at one end, and reloading a different ship at the other end. You can build enough tracks to get any rate you need, but can you get the load/unload speed?

We're talking about Mexico right?

But if a shipping container is delayed a little waiting for a ship it's no big deal.

That tends to imply that what you want in shipping is a bunch of reliable legs, not one point-to-point transport?

Those containers don't have to be loaded directly onto a train, they would likely get unloaded into a yard.

This sort of transport is used to complicated logistics, it wont' take long to get ironed out

<containers on average ship> * <lenght of railway carriage>

It also says they eventually plan to increase the capacity to 1.4 million TEU per year, equivalent to 54 New Panamax container ships in each direction.

given 2-10k TEU per ship, that does not sound nearly enough

> That works out to 11.5 New Panamax ships per year in each direction

It seems like that it's enough, for 11.5 new panamax ships per year in each direction.

The project goal of 1.4 million containers is 16% as much traffic as the canal. For comparison the existing Panama Canal railway has a capacity of 2 million TEU/year.

[0] (yes these are annual not monthly) https://www.ceicdata.com/en/indicator/panama/container-port-...

I am not sure how much the railway helps. There is already a railway across North America and it's still cheaper to go via Panama at this scale.

Rarely do all containers go in one large batch from just one port to another single one.

Or are you saying they wouldn't be limited by panamax, so could theoretically lower costs on the shipping portion?

" The Australian BHP Iron Ore is the longest train ever recorded in history at approximately 4.6 miles (7.353 km). In the Pilbara region of Western Australia, BHP owns and runs the Mount Newman railway. This is a private rail network designed to transport iron ore "

"Invented in the United States in 1984, it is now being used for nearly seventy percent of United States intermodal shipments. Using double stack technology, a freight train of a given length can carry roughly twice as many containers, sharply reducing transport costs per container."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Double-stack_rail_transport

But generally going around the southern tip of South America could well be cheaper--although it may take longer.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27463198

It does seem like it would make sense for solving water issues in the southwest, at the very least.

With apologies to those with real estate interests in large swathes of California, Arizona, New Mexico, and Texas, at some point you must understand the inherent absurdity of living in an increasingly-inhospitable desert climate, and that no amount of nuclear bombs with which to blast a saltwater canal through Mexico will change the fact that you should move to the Great Lakes if you want access to freshwater.

As opposed to where, exactly?

The entire northern half of the United States can’t grow for shit because its summer growing season is a barely a few months long and the winters are inhospitable to everything except a winter squash or two. The center is a giant dust bowl because they tried to grow more than they could support. The East barely has any arable land without catastrophically deforesting the area.

That leaves the South which is either desert on the Western half or even more inhospitable swamp on the Eastern half. If the desert were really so bad, it wouldn’t be able to produce half the produce in the country plus extra for international export.

Gonna need a source for this claim

> The Golden State’s agricultural abundance includes 400 different commodities. The state produces about half of U.S.-grown fruits, nuts and vegetables. With less than four percent of the nation’s farms and ranches, California produces over 13 % percent of the nation’s agricultural production value. [1]

Most of the rest of the agricultural production in the country is animals and animal feed (and ethanol and biofuels), not produce people want to actually eat directly.

[1] https://www.fsa.usda.gov/Internet/FSA_File/10cafacts_v3.pdf

[1] https://nypost.com/2023/09/12/americas-biggest-trading-partn...

[2] https://nypost.com/2023/08/08/china-exports-plummet-as-us-fi...

[3] https://www.marketplace.org/2023/11/21/with-mexico-the-top-u...

[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NAFTA_superhighway

[5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interstate_69

[6] https://thelastdriverlicenseholder.com/2022/01/12/almost-40-...

[7] https://unctad.org/system/files/official-document/rmt2019_en...