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Comment by keiferski | Hacker News Reader

This is also why Mexico is building a rail-based alternative to the Panama Canal:

It comprises a 300-kilometer railway line from the Pacific port of Salina Cruz to Coatzacoalcos on the other side of the Isthmus of Tehuantepec…

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

Theoretically, the standardized nature of containers should make switching from ships to trains relatively efficient.

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It means you need to time a ship to be on the receiving end. It sort of requires symmetric regular 2-way traffic to work.

True but maybe the time saved by cutting across Mexico and waiting for a receiver ship will still be less than going south through Panama.

The extra time for Panama is waiting for your slot, not the time it takes to drive the boat there.

Probably depends on where you’re shipping from. Houston to East Asia is almost certainly faster through Mexico than down through Panama.

Time only really matters for the ships. A ship sitting around, full or empty, is burning money.

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

Is that different from purely-oceanic shipping? The Box says that Malcom McLean decided to run a container ship that only went east, and it was a miserable failure because a delay on any part of the route meant the same delay happened everywhere else in the route (because it was the same ship).

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

But you do get the opportunity of running multiple smaller ships on the receiving end to different destinations.

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 you do get the opportunity of running multiple smaller ships on the receiving end to different destinations.

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...

In this case Mexico is a sovereign country so the Jones Act won’t apply.

One end is Mexico sothe jones act won't apply. In fact this could make thing, cheaper because a small ship, for a short run makes sense

40% of all us containers go through the canal.

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.

The context here is bypassing the canal for a railroad across Mexico. While you have described the problem with the Jones act, the premises is we are loading/unloading in Mexico that changes a lot. Smaller ships can go to many different ports - large ones would probably still got to North Carolina, but we can sort in Mexico which means some (likely small) shipping company can run routes to smaller ports, they can take exports from those smaller ports and then sorting in Mexico can get it on/off the right ships. For US east coast to cargo that is crossing the pacific this makes sense (it doesn't make sense for cargo crossing the Atlantic though, so the Jones act is still a problem)

This is effectively what happens with air cargo in Anchorage. It's a nice mid-point between asia and north america. They can receive aircraft cargo from many different sources in asia and then shuffle it between aircraft to ship it to different destinations in north america.

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

I remember having the shower thought that you could replace canals with railways by redesigning ships to automatically, rapidly offload containers directly onto some superfast maglev railway, effectively "shooting" the containers to the other side.

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...

So then why not build a bigger rail system and put the land equivalent of container ships on rails? I'm serious.

First: When the GP said 13,000 containers, I presume that's TEU (twenty-foot equivalent unit). A double-stack rail car holds 4 TEU. That means that you only (!) need 3,250 cars to replace the ship. That's a really long train.

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?

No I literally mean build a giant wide railroad and make something the size of a container ship, which has the capacity. That's what goes on the rails.

We're talking about Mexico right?

We should probably stick with trains, they can be several km long and it means we don't have to build an entirely new machine with all the new technical challenges that would entail.

With a smarter system like ETCS you shouldn't need 10 minutes headway

Thanks for adding detail, but the idea would be to avoid having to group them into a trains at all -- the containers would powered (like a rail gun) and be "shot" straight through the rail system as they're placed on the track.

Seems like it would be a good test for a theoretical "hyperloop" thing, or a maglev. Hyperloop shouldn't be tested first with humans.

Or a very big trebuchet to fling 90 deadweight kilotons 300 kilometers.

That’s ridiculous. It should be 350 kilometers to account for headwinds.

If you get it most of the way, it can just roll downhill the rest of the way.

What would be amazing is if you could capture it on the receiving and and recover the kinetic energy somehow to transport to the launching site.

Well, that's what wings are for.

That doesn't sound at all like what wings are for.

Oh, sorry, I meant recovering the energy to propel the ship. I overlooked the part about sending it back to the trebuchet.

This sort of approach seems to lend itself very well to a tranship port similar to Singapore - you can async have pickups/deliveries - most cargo containers are fine sitting in a tranship port for a few days.

UDP couldn't work here?

No it doesn’t. One ship from Asia could be split up and resorted as part of this with some of it gojng on to New Orleans some to Newark some to Miami and so on.

An atlantic ship could immediately start unloading without waiting for their turn through the canal, it could be a speed advantage because that ship is now ready to turn around and get another load.

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

can someone more caffeinated than me, do the math here plz? i suspect there will be some lengthy trains involved.

New Panamax ships can carry 13,000 twenty-foot-equivalent units. 13,000 * 20 ft = 260,000 ft = 49 miles. (You can stack containers on top of each other, so 25 miles. There also needs to be space between the containers on a train for the couplers, etc., though, so a real train would probably be longer than this.)

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.

24000 TEU ships don't fit into Panama canal.

Well they didn't mention 24000 teu.

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

They did calculate with 24000 TEUs, edited the comment afterwards. All good.

Yup, I did. I had that thought like, wait, can that big a ship fit through the Panama canal? The answer is... no ;)

Sounds like what they need is a conveyor belt

terrific idea

Pretty fragile though.

idk, could be addressed with segmentation and redundancy thou

Not if you put it on some sort of rail system, and make sure each unit that's on the system has the capability to push/stop itself on this rail system.

why not a slingshot?

Some sort of a sideways space-elevator.

Space fountain working with containers! :)

Not sure if GP meant the math for just the trains bit. There is an increase in handling, and everytime the container changes hands, it's going to cost (assuming dearly). First the ship has to berth (cost), unloaded using QC gantry (cost) onto an ITV (cost) where it gets stacked using a stacker/gantry (cost) in a yard (cost) and then unstacked using a stacker/gantry (cost) onto a truck/ITV (cost) which takes it to a stacker/gantry (cost) which then stacks it onto a train (cost). This is then probably going to be reversed on the other side of the train destination assuming it's a port.

The handling is an opportunity too, though. Now you can merge cargo from several ships, and split the cargo from one ship to several others.

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

i don't disagree, but were it that advantageous, there would be islands in the pacific where this happened

Panamax ships can carry up to 5000 ISO containers, while Neopanamax (the ones using the new set of locks) carry up to 14000. No idea about LPG tankers, etc.

Only if all containers are empty. It is usually less than 14,000 if you assume the average weight of four and a half tons per container.

couldn't you just use more trains rather than longer trains? I'm sure it wouldn't cost as much as developing entirely new types of trains.

The Japan Times article says they plan to initially carry 300,000 TEU per year in both directions, via three round-trip trains per day (~=137 TEU per train). That works out to 11.5 New Panamax ships per year in each direction.

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.

> via three round-trip trains per day (~=137 TEU per train)

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

The math in the post you responded to checks out:

> 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.

300k TEU a DAY would sound about right.

That's roughly 10x the traffic through the canal.[0]

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-...

For 1000 containers of the 40 foot class (which are more widespread than the standard 20 foot class, the train would have to be about 14.5 km long. If you take 1/2 m distance between the wagons.

For reference:

" 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 "

In the U.S. they often double stack containers--so that would be half the distance if they could:

"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.

You're right about that. However, this probably only works with diesel-powered locomotives and not with electrified railway systems.

why wouldn't it apply to electrified railways? I mean it's all energy in the end. I'm sure they make electric motors powerful enough and you can pull your own batteries as part of the load.

The clearance above the train. You have to rebuild every passenger transportation train to work with higher clearance or you build a dedicated railway system only for transportation. Neither financial nor ecologically sustainable.

I mean it would seem to be an innovation but "invention" seems like a stretch as there is nothing new about stacking stuff. I mean it should be a staightforward idea/extrapolation for any "good" mechanical engineer familiar with railroads and trains?

I wander if there are any publically available topographical maps along the roughly estimated region available to find an optimal path, even if it's a "as the crow flies" estimate.

I wonder how effective this is though? An average container ship has 10,000 6.1 meter long containers. That a lot of carriages and trains.

So much manufacturing is moving from China to Mexico that Mexico is now the US' biggest trading partner [1] [2] [3]. As China ages rapidly, labor costs rise, and deglobalization occurs, the future won't be the past of enormous container loads from China eastbound. North American infra is the new hotness [4] [5]. Tangentially, 40% of ship cargoes are fossil fuels [6] [7], consider how that reduces marine traffic volume with the global energy transition underway.

[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...

I wonder if cartels will try to rob it eventually.

As I read the article and the comments, all I can think of is all the bribes. The cartels don’t have to rob it. They will just charge protection fees.

But cartels also compete with each other.

That’s nuts. Carrying cargo ships by rail is going to require huge locomotives

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

Woosh

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

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

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

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

probably not a good idea at all

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

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

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.

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.

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?

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.

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

That's only true for the locks.

That's the joke

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

1000 axles sounds doable, but maybe not very practical.

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. :-)

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

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...

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

In all likelihood, the terrain is the bottleneck here.

You're gonna need a bigger boat train.

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

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.

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..

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.

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

Does it make sense to connect west and east coast via inland waterway e.g. Snake <-> Missouri river. Would it be too expensive? I assume nukes are out of the question.

I wondered about this before:

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.

> 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.

> at some point you must understand the inherent absurdity of living in an increasingly-inhospitable desert climate

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.

AFAIK The only desert state that produces a lot of produce is California and the southwest region by no means produces half of the nations produce (the Midwest is the nations breadbasket.)

Gonna need a source for this claim

My choice of words was imprecise. Produce as in stuff in the produce section of your supermarket (fruit and vegetables), not general agricultural products. Arizona produces a lot for its size too but California takes the cake:

> 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

Factorio vibes

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