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Comment by lcuff | Hacker News Reader

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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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...

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. :-)

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

In all likelihood, the terrain is the bottleneck here.

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