How much would this have to scale up to reduce the container ship demand?
Also pollution wise you can (at least in theory) electrify the whole route and run electric trains on it, which should make the whole thing quite clean (as long as the energy sources are reasonably clean).
For ships that's more involved - IIRC some can run on LNG but otherwise you would basically have to make them nuclear powered if you wanted zero emissions. At least until you have carbon capture & fuel synthesization running.
Generally shipping cost functions like this gradient.
Ships < Trains < Trucks < Aircraft
Obvious considerations other than cost:
Ships can only come to port. Trains likewise can only go to rail stations. This makes trains slightly more expensive land ships from a logistics perspective.
Trucks can go anywhere over land, but are quite a step up in expense. They are still necessary for something last 10 miles shipping in nearly all cases.
Airplanes are special. They are probably best thought of as very fast very expensive trains. Their main drawback being that they need an airport to land and load.
Other aircraft (helicopters/bush-pilots). Also a special case. These are quite expensive and generally only used when the landscape precludes the building of necessary infrastructure. Areas where this makes sense are remote by definition; generally landlocked with no nearby airport or roads to/from the nearest airport. Often companies that provide these services like to take passengers as humans who want to travel to remote regions are cost effective in terms of freight ($$$).
Blimps (not currently used commercially). Renewed development into using blimps to transport freight is being researched by several governments including the USG. Blimps are quite efficient at moving freight around as they utilize the same physical properties that ships use (buoyancy). They require very little infrastructure to take-off and land; comparable to that of helicopters. Added bonus! Blimps are more difficult to raid by organize crime elements and move slowly enough to make autonomous piloting a possibility. Both factors are expected to be huge cost savers for logistics in the coming decades.
For example, one of the reasons trucking is more expensive than trains is the number of humans required to operate the vehicles. Shipping lanes are expected to become more contested as NAFTA begins to contend with a multi-polar global powers dynamic (China, Russia, India (,perhaps even SEA will get their shit together!)).
Thus a low cost, low infrastructure, piracy-resistant solution is being searched for. Blimps do have an obvious downside of limited volume and several high profile catastrophes, though these are now a century old. All that being said, we could see blimps beginning to fill in the gaps as early as the end of this decade.
for now...
perhaps if blimp shipping becomes common we will see the development of pirate blimps. one can hope anyway :)
Maybe loads of lithium batteries? Autos? Some foodstuffs good for 7 days but not 21? Trains can make lots of stops, but that can make a lot of sense for global goods.
>Trucks can go anywhere over land, but are quite a step up in expense. They are still necessary for something last 10 miles shipping in nearly all cases.
Trains and trucks can effectively go to the same places for what it's worth. The infrastructure is roughly the same cost. For fairly standard rail it is $1-2 million per mile, road is $1-5 million per mile for a typical two lane road.
You don't need a rail station either, businesses can just use forklifts, pallet jacks, cranes, etc to unload rail cars in a very similar way to how trucks are unloaded.
Around here in the midwest if you look at google maps you can see that a lot of older businesses had or have rail going to them, but since trucks got massive subsidies over the last 60-70 years trains haven't seen as much use in this way.
This is true by approximate order of cost, but it does not show how large the differences are. Trucking can be up to 10X, an order of magnitude, more expensive than train by unit of mass. Air freight can be another similar jump in costs. The cost difference between maritime and rail is marginal by comparison, 10s of percent. Maybe.
This also doesn’t take into account that rail can be easily electrified and even fully automated with limited labor needed, which would radically alter the operating cost structure. The technology to do this has existed for a long time (over a century in the case of electrification), it is a solved problem, but it requires prioritizing and making public investments just like the other forms of transportation.
There are also big differences in the average speed of the different modes. Ships are the slowest by far, taking about a month to cross oceans. Aircraft are the fastest on long distances. Trains and trucks are in between, but are inherently land-based so generally aren’t comparable to the others for intercontinental shipping, except for this Eurasian shipping case. Rail can occupy a unique Goldilocks sweet spot in mechanized transport, with costs competitive to maritime, yet offering performance competitive to roads and air.
Re Airships: I agree this is an area where government and industry has sorely neglected. After the crashes of the Hindenburg, USS Macon, and USS Akron in the 1930s, govt/industry just gave up on it despite our understanding of aeronautics and materials science being far more advanced. There is the Airlander airship project in Britain, but I’d like to see a lot more research and investment in this area.
It seems theoretically possible to create a Lighter Than Air (LTA) aircraft with helium (possibly hydrogen), cover it with flexible lightweight solar panels, battery pack, and distributed electric thrusters. It could have all electric power and propulsion systems with extreme endurance and range, theoretically unlimited minus scheduled maintenance, if the performance curves of those core technologies continue to improve. In addition to cargo, it could be a platform for telecom (cell tower in the sky), air cruises, various defense/security use cases, various atmospheric/oceanic and climate/metrological and earth observation/remote sensing use cases, etc.
I'll see if I can still edit my comment to account for the much greater steps up in cost as you are correct.
You see, with a train or ship, it will just exert less ground pressure or float higher in the water when you remove they payload. With an airship it will shoot straight up unless mitigated when you suddenly remove tens of tons of its weight.
Unless you want to release the precious lifting gas (usually helium) you need to address this in ways that make airships quite a bit less flexible for aerial cargo transport, such as pre-arranging return cargo of similar weight or arranging for water to be taken into ballast tanks to compensate for cargo being unloaded.
Not only can container ships carry a fuckton of containers, but investments have also been made in ports throughout the world to load/unload the cargo in these ships.
Freight trains might perhaps cater to a niche where they’re faster than ships but slower than airplanes. Or serve as a backup for essential commodities when there are snags with the global trade routes.
But ocean shipping is absolutely bonkers at the scale at which it currently operates. The ships are only getting more massive.
But where boats and barges can operate, they usually win.
it seems the longest US train ever had ~700 containers
I don't think that this comparison is the best way of looking at it, but FWIW, the largest container ships can haul just shy of 24k containers.
I see it kind of like a station wagon full of tapes, versus a fast internet pipe. The station wagon can possibly move more, but has much, much more latency. (and that analogy doesn't account for the time to load/unload the tapes onto the computer systems)
Denver to LA will never be viable by ship. Shenzhen to LA will never be viable by train.
Probably, but a certain breed of politician (across nationalities) keeps the dream alive:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bering_Strait_crossing#21st_ce...