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Comment by quickthrower2 | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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.

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.

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

> 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...

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 ;)

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

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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

UDP couldn't work here?

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

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.

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