Panama Canal drought forces Maersk to start using land bridge for Oceania cargo

Re:Panama Canal drought forces Maersk to start using land br... by kylehotchkiss on Sunday January 14, 2024 @04:38AM (#38988934)

Especially when you consider the ship sizes are no longer constrained by the Panama Canal so they could double the size, you might need another 30 locomotives to pull that across mexico

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Re:Panama Canal drought forces Maersk to start using land br... by taspeotis on Sunday January 14, 2024 @04:32AM (#38988903)

It’s carrying cargo ships’ cargo… shipping containers.

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Re:Panama Canal drought forces Maersk to start using land br... by littlestymaar on Sunday January 14, 2024 @06:08AM (#38989408)

Woosh

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Re:Panama Canal drought forces Maersk to start using land br... by Y-bar on Sunday January 14, 2024 @06:40AM (#38989552)

That’s clearly not the sound a cargo ship makes when travelling by rail across Mexico.

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Re:Panama Canal drought forces Maersk to start using land br... by labrador on Sunday January 14, 2024 @04:44AM (#38988955)

Not a bad idea. There's nothing preventing us from building a rail line large enough to carry a cargo ship.

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Re:Panama Canal drought forces Maersk to start using land br... by lcuff on Sunday January 14, 2024 @05:43AM (#38989262)

Gulp: A fully loaded neo-Panamax ship is rated to carry 120,000 tons DWT (which excludes the weight of the ship itself). A train composed of heavy-axle rail cars has an upper limit of about 160 tons. Building bridges and a rail bed to carry a load 1,000 times larger than ever before is no small thing. Then you need to build drydocks to get a fully-loaded ship on and off a train. Building rail cars that would hold the thing ... I wonder if it's even possible in metallurgical terms ... I seriously doubt a rail-car wheel could carry 1,000 times as much load as it does currently.

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Re:Panama Canal drought forces Maersk to start using land br... by monomers on Sunday January 14, 2024 @06:18AM (#38989455)

> train composed of heavy-axle rail cars has an upper limit of about 160 tons.

1000 axles sounds doable, but maybe not very practical.

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Re:Panama Canal drought forces Maersk to start using land br... by m4rtink on Sunday January 14, 2024 @08:54AM (#38990377)

Well: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/La_Compagnie_des_glaces

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. :-)

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Re:Panama Canal drought forces Maersk to start using land br... by mgiampapa on Sunday January 14, 2024 @05:51AM (#38989309)

You just dig a trench and fill it with seawater, then float it over. The train just needs to go next to it to pull the boat.

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Re:Panama Canal drought forces Maersk to start using land br... by lcuff on Sunday January 14, 2024 @06:09AM (#38989413)

The comment I responded to did say 'carry'.

'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?

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Re:Panama Canal drought forces Maersk to start using land br... by bluGill on Sunday January 14, 2024 @08:46AM (#38990310)

Canales origionly used mules to pull the boats. that today would avoid the props on ship digging up the bottom. Those land based trains can also be electric for environmental savings.

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Re:Panama Canal drought forces Maersk to start using land br... by wongarsu on Sunday January 14, 2024 @08:47AM (#38990315)

In the Panama Canal ships are pulled by locomotives on rails next to the canal. They have to do that because the canal is too narrow for ships to steer under their own power

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Re:Panama Canal drought forces Maersk to start using land br... by jcranmer on Sunday January 14, 2024 @10:48AM (#38991463)

That's only true for the locks.

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Re:Panama Canal drought forces Maersk to start using land br... by coryrc on Sunday January 14, 2024 @10:50AM (#38991479)

That's the joke

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Re:Panama Canal drought forces Maersk to start using land br... by ajb on Sunday January 14, 2024 @09:01AM (#38990429)

Where are you getting this 160 tonne figure from? An individual car can approach that, according to https://www.cn.ca/en/customer-centre/safety-guidelines-and-r....

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

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Re:Panama Canal drought forces Maersk to start using land br... by lcuff on Sunday January 14, 2024 @01:07PM (#38992712)

You're right. Brain burp/misread on my part. That's a figure for individual cars. Union Pacific site:

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

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Re:Panama Canal drought forces Maersk to start using land br... by marcosdumay on Sunday January 14, 2024 @11:36AM (#38991882)

> I wonder if it's even possible in metallurgical terms

In all likelihood, the terrain is the bottleneck here.

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Re:Panama Canal drought forces Maersk to start using land br... by bregma on Sunday January 14, 2024 @07:14AM (#38989746)

You're gonna need a bigger boat train.

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Re:Panama Canal drought forces Maersk to start using land br... by Cthulhu_ on Sunday January 14, 2024 @05:03AM (#38989059)

Not a new idea either, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portage comes up but I'm sure I've seen much bigger versions.

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Re:Panama Canal drought forces Maersk to start using land br... by jeffreygoesto on Sunday January 14, 2024 @05:53AM (#38989323)

https://imdb.com/title/tt0083946/

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

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Re:Panama Canal drought forces Maersk to start using land br... by geraldhh on Sunday January 14, 2024 @05:08AM (#38989095)

probably not a good idea at all

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Re:Panama Canal drought forces Maersk to start using land br... by foobarian on Sunday January 14, 2024 @11:17AM (#38991732)

At that point it might as well make sense to dig an actual waterway connecting the two oceans.

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Re:Panama Canal drought forces Maersk to start using land br... by jcrawfordor on Sunday January 14, 2024 @11:00AM (#38991584)

Not huge locomotives, more of them. BNSF regularly operates trains that carry nearly 1,000 containers at about 10,000 feet length on the transcon. I believe the configuration is three front, four center, three rear.

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Re:Panama Canal drought forces Maersk to start using land br... by fransje26 on Sunday January 14, 2024 @04:24PM (#38994574)

So.. 10 trains per ship then. With 38 ships per day, that's 380 trains.

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..

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Re:Panama Canal drought forces Maersk to start using land br... by jcrawfordor on Monday January 15, 2024 @01:02PM (#39003938)

Not really that far from current transcon capacity, headways are routinely under ten minutes during busy hours. Doesn't seem hard to achieve on a dedicated route. Especially in a totally new installation that might be fully double-tracked and use a moving block system.

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Re:Panama Canal drought forces Maersk to start using land br... by EasyMark on Sunday January 14, 2024 @09:47PM (#38996911)

so kind of like memory? "unused rail is wasted rail"

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