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The upgraded Coatzacoalcos - Salina Cruz line, as well the ports in both cities, are managed by the state-owned Isthmus of Tehuantepec Railway, part of the Mexican Navy.

https://www.railjournal.com/passenger/main-line/passenger-op...

By 2028, the Isthmus of Tehuantepec Interoceanic Corridor (CIIT) should see 300,000 cargo containers transit every year, with 1.4 million — about 33 million tons — by 2033. The 80-km Panama Canal moved about 63.2 million tons in 2022.

https://www.japantimes.co.jp/business/2023/11/16/mexico-rail...

It’s a big operation, putting together a new container-oriented freight railroad, and I hope it goes well!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fast_Five

The rehabilitation increased the speed from 12mph to 43mph. They are planning passenger train that can reach 50mph. So that is probably limit to the railroad.

According to Wikipedia, it’s an old line that has speed limitations in some areas of 20 kph. Addressing these limitations is a substantial part of the rehabilitation project, aiming to get the speed from 20 kph up to 70 kph.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interoceanic_Corridor_of_the...

“the rehabilitation is reportedly expected to result in a speed increase for trains using the railway, from 20 kilometres per hour (12 mph) to 70 km/h (43 mph) for cargo trains, and of up to 80 km/h (50 mph) for passenger trains”

Speeds are regulated.. Here's some reading: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rail_speed_limits_in_the_Unite....)

bonus if they can connect to rail heading to the middle of the us (think El Paso to Denever)

As in, every union member gets an immediate pension and $1M cash as part of the legalization.

I think this might be where their big advantage would be. The ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach are at capacity (and considered inefficient), and the Mexican container port of Manzanillo further down the coast is only medium-sized (1.4 million TEUs). If Mexico were to build dedicated freight corridors like India has, they could move an amazing amount of cargo into the central US.

Already the "drought" is causing issues with the Panama canal, and not only is that drought never-ending, it's going to get worse over time (climate change).

https://www.ft.com/content/bbe8e851-e9f2-4ed1-a4a7-051a670b4...

I doubt that. Isn't the Canal already operating at maximum capacity? The railroad would simply enable more traffic. It's not zero sum.

Being a specialized load (read, unusual cargo, not containerized, on a barge) I doubt transloading to rail and back onto a ship on the other side would have been practical in our case but for other cargoes? It might be an attractive alternative.

I'm assuming being able to punt and offload and swap cargo would be a welcome alternative for operators. Maybe you spend a day to offload and load new cargo but that would beat waiting two days for a slot to open up at the panama canal.

So why isn't this rail line already taking the traffic Mexico hopes for?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38992104

On thenship all 3000 containers arrive at once and the total time to move them is 3000miles / 20 = 150 hours.

On the rail the containers take 50hr to offload. Hence the first container will arrive at the other side in 3000/300 = 10 hours. The _last_ container will arrive at 60 hrs 0 minutes. At one minute per container in the 150hrs it took the ship to arrive you could have delivered 140*60 = 8400 containers to the other side.

Not that the ship is only 15 times slower than the railway.

The governing factors on your railway are the ratios for distance to travel vs the offload time. Or put another way the delay bandwidth product.

If you're considering a case of 3000 miles, that's not a canal anymore and can use the full size ships that carry 18,000 containers.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Triple_E-class_container_ship?...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Container_Terminal_Altenwerder

I've seen these in action many times and called it 'techno-ballet'. Rather impressive. I guess meanwhile there are even more advanced ports, but I didn't track that development.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Port_of_Rotterdam#Robotic_cont... comes to mind, though.

And the train-to-ship part would double as ship-to-ship redistribution, fanning out to different ports in both Asia and on the east coast. Basically a role similar to the one served by Atlanta in the United network.

Is there an engineering solution to recycling more of the water and flushing less of it to sea?

I am seeing numbers that it costs anywhere between $100k-400k per trip to go through the canal, with some tens of ships per day.

So of course, this highly profitable venture would dedicate basically nothing to improving the infrastructure until it became a tire fire.

But using less water in the first place, I'm curious what approaches might exist.

I guess in principle something like this could also be retrofitted to the existing locks.

Mexico’s government is bullish about prospects for the rail crossing, which will offer proximity to the US and a transit time of 6.5 hours excluding loading time — less than the eight to 10 hours it takes on the 80km canal.

Much more than transit time, I'm interested in throughput. How long does it take to move a full container ship's contents from one end to the other? How long does it take just to unload and load?

Also, regarding loading/unloading: When I think of a train, I imagine it being loaded/unloaded in semi-serial - first the front cars, then the next set of cars, as the train moves segment-by-segment past the ship. Essentially you are transforming a massive pile of containers onto a long string of containers. Is that correct? Is there any solution to speed it up? I suppose they could lay several train tracks in parallel alongside the ship and use extra train engines to pull up groups of rail cars, and then reconnect them into one long train as the train pulls out. How long is a train carrying a full container ship's capacity?

Cost seems the other essential question: Sea transport costs a fraction of rail transport, generally, but I expect that canal transport is far more expensive than open sea transport.

[0] https://www.ft.com/content/bbe8e851-e9f2-4ed1-a4a7-051a670b4...

So this rail isn't going to be tremendously useful unless they connect it directly to the USA.

As for loading the trains, they already do it in parallel; look at an arial photo of a stockyard. For this specific use, you could parallelize it even more I suspect.

Why does connecting directly to the US help? If you're in one ocean and just want to access the US, can't you just steam direct to a US port?

More importantly the Sierra Madre ranges are large geographic barriers throughout most of Mexico but are relatively flat in the area of the Chivela pass, where this rail line is.

The elevation of the plateau in between the Sierra Madres is no joke; Mexico City is at 7349 ft elevation.

The whole thing comes into its own if Panama is overloaded and the other option is taking around the South America).

According to Wikipedia[1], "Container ship capacity is measured in twenty-foot equivalent units (TEU)."

And container ship size categories are (conveniently!) based on what can fit through the Panama Canal. Neopanamax ships are the category that can fit through in the canal's new (upgraded) configuration, and those can hold 10,000 to 14,500 TEU.

For round numbers I'll use 10,000 TEU. That means if you laid all the containers end to end, they would stretch out 200,000 feet, which is about 38 miles or 61 km.

Trains can stack containers two high[2], so divide that by two, and a train has to be at least 19 miles or 30 km. But really somewhat longer since one train car's containers don't butt up directly against the next car's containers.

So presumably they would need multiple trains for one ship's cargo.

---

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Container_ship

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Double-stack_rail_transport

If it is more than 8-10 hours, you start getting overlapped I/O.

As to parallelization, I wonder how much of the route is a single track. Parallel tracks could allow coming and going without interference. (then there are siding and crossover tracks, etc)

I also wonder - do you have to unload EVERYTHING? maybe just the express cargo, while the rest of the ship waits.

Or you could combine ship cargo and one ship could make the long trip, while others return back across the pacific.

This is going to sound snarky, but I genuinely look forward to how this operates with the current state of the Mexico government, lawlessness, cartels, and in that particular area, insurgents.

Bad actors are not going to simply ignore the value, there.

I would really love to see Mexico become a rich country with a functional and less-corrupt government/military/law enforcement. That seems insurmountable within a generation, though.

Also, if a certain skim percentage becomes acceptable loss to all parties, the cartels will want more.

Amen to that. That will never happen as long as we continue The War on Drugs™ -- and that appears to be an impossible habit to kick.

Decriminalizing hard drugs has been a failed experiment in Oregon, where hard drug use shot up drastically.

Is the problem the increased usage, or is it the secondary effects (more homelessness, etc)?

1. https://olis.oregonlegislature.gov/liz/2024R1/Measures/Overv...

The problem was that there was no way to compel people into treatment for addiction when the drugs were essentially legal. There was an attempt to replicate what Portugal had done in the early aughts, but as I understand it they could compel people into treatment. The other problem was lack of treatment resources - even if people wanted treatment it could be difficult to come by. While I tended to favor decriminalization before, after seeing the results close up it seems that there should have been a longer period of preparation prior to the enacting legalization. And for substances like fetanyl and meth - highly addictive substances that cause people to resort to crime to keep up the habit - it's probably not be a good idea to ever legalize them because overdosing, death and permanent mental damage are common. We need a more nuanced approach where less addictive (and non-addictive) drugs like pot, LSD, shrooms, etc. are essentially legal while highly addictive drugs remain illegal with stiff penalties for distribution.

So, how do you minimize the impact to everyone?

Given my experiences in Oregon, I'm having trouble thinking of it as sensible, but I'm open-minded.

I don't know how many addicts y'all have been around, but in my experience no one wants to be an addict.

So while it seems logical to the rest of us that addicts don't want to be addicts, they're also apparently not willing to tap into that help.

You can argue this or that about something not being funded right, or set up right, but at the end of the day, these people have to make efforts. And a lot of them try! I talk to them! A lot just don't give a crap and have given up on life.

Then begs the question: who's going to pay for it, and from where? Our education is already underfunded, and personally I'd rather see funds go to education, particularly non-special education (already well-funded) and Career Technical Education.

Getting clean requires a ton of energy and patience and it often hurts like hell. For someone who is spending 100% of their energy on surviving and managing their addiction, they might not have the reserves to try to get clean.

We need to figure out how to reach them, not write them off.

Also, "I'd rather fund x instead of y" is a trap. We can do both, and we can say the bar is fully funded education and fully funded support for addiction and recovery.

While it would seem likely that addicts do not want to be addicts, they're not exactly responding to the outreach and least in my metro area (3rd largest city in OR).

I think discussions on criminalizing or decriminalizing or The War on Drugs is a waste of time if the goal is to reduce drug usage because they only affect the symptoms of the drug problem. We should still discuss them, but for other reasons.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fourth_Transformation#Infrastr...

The US needs to get its drug war policy in line, but so much is on the line that I think the cartels are going to become a point of "special emphasis" in the coming decade. Mexico is going to become the center of manufacturing for the US in all likelihood.

The cartel/drug civil war will come to an end as part of a broad sweep of investment and interest by the United States. I just don't see the cartels maintaining their political/corruption power when the stakes become so much higher.

The cartels either need to legitimize, or they'll probably get a healthy dose of US military forces attention and be ground to dust.

Sheinbaum is the current governor of Mexico city, and candidate and frontrunner for the upcoming presidential elections.

Note: Mexico doesn't do presidential reelections - even temporary holders of the post can never run for or hold it again. They had a number of civil wars and related fights around this so it's taken very seriously.

Plus the time to unload and load all those containers (3-4days). I don't see rail competing with the canal.

Edit: On average there are 7.5 container ships transiting the Panama canal per day. And it takes 8-10 hours to transit ocean-to-ocean.

If you can get dozens of trains from coast to coast in the time it takes to get one caego ship through the canal, that could end up being significantly more economical - and maybe even faster - in the long run.

Sure, you could scale it and build 10 train tracks side-by-side (whoa!) which would support 5 trains in each direction, and then you'd only need to get 8 trains faster in total.

And that's disregarding the 3-4 days needed on either end to unload/load the ships.

Not really, no.

It takes 3 to 4 days to unload 1 ship, and we can assume it takes about the same time to reload them on the other side. Let's be generous, and assume that we can put the entire load on one train, that has an average speed of 40 km/h. That will be an other 8 hours gone to get from harbor A to harbor B. So, for one ship, you went from a 10 hour crossing, to 8+ days of loading-train-travel-unloading.

Now for the logistics part. If one ship holds 15,000 containers, and a train carries 400 containers, you need 38 trains to transfer 1 ship worth of containers.

In 2022, 19 ships a day passed through the Panama canal, per direction. So you would need 722 trains to process the same capacity.

You have 1440 minutes in a day, so to absorb the the incoming freight, you will need a train every 2 minutes on a single track, 24 hours a day. Which, is completely unrealistic. You can double the track, and now you have a 4 minute slot in between trains, per track. Still completely unrealistic. If you would have 5 tracks per direction, you can get to a 10 minute slot in between trains, 24 hours a day, which is still not realistic.

So, in conclusion, we can say that the rail solution does not scale better.

10 min slot is starting to be realistic. But the unloading/reloading is still not realistic. At least, not with current trains and loading cranes. If you could make special purpose rail and cars which hold 4 containers per car (2 side by side, stacked 2 high), you get 4x capacity, now only 2 tracks per direction is enough. Special cranes which could sit above whole ship and unload several containers at once would speed unloading.

Such engineering challenge would probably cost as much as original canal, but would not require so much water (water is main bottleneck currently).

It sounds impractical, but so does marshaling all the trucks and trains to get the very same containers from the original shippers to the ports of origin and from the ports of destination to the final recipients.

Could be done, I guess. The high-speed tracks in Europe are protected with fences, and have no level crossings, so the same could be done here to have a fully-automatic motorized wagon system. Without locomotive you would need a third-rail electricity pick-up system. Less safe, but the track is fenced off, so why not?

Mexico building rail rival as water shortages drain Panama Canal

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38991317

Mexico building rail rival as water shortages drain Panama Canal - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38991317 - Jan 2024 (107 comments)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=glR7lvtrGRI