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Comment by bilsbie | Hacker News Reader

Surely this is a mega project:

but naively, what if we built say ten parallel railways 10 ft apart and moved cargo ships over the rails?

Or this guy only needs to be scaled up 10X to do the job. Not outside the realm of imagination? https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crawler-transporter

I know the ships are huge and it shouldn’t be feasible but it would be interesting to run the numbers.

Edit. Actually if my math is right just four of these guys could transport a fully loaded Panamax ship: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Honghai_Crane

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I'm no engineer, but I would not imagine that the Panamax ships are built to handle that kinda of stress while still loaded with cargo. The ships are designed to have the weight of itself and its cargo spread out pushing out against the displaced water pushing back on the hull rather evenly and not a handful of highly concentrated points.

Just build a giant bathtub and tow that /s

If it’s stupid and it works… !

Reminds me of the Falkirk Wheel https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Falkirk_Wheel

Or the huge boat lift of Strépy-Thieu: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Str%C3%A9py-Thieu_boat_lift

Or - hear me out here - we build a giant man made ditch. Maybe we call it something clever, like a canal?

Imagine the hilarity if the giant bathtub train car derails and tips over. Has there ever been a train wreck that caused a flood? If not, there's a first time for everything.

There's also the possibility that you get 100 km inland and then the bathtub springs a leak. Not a good situation if the ship's structural integrity depends on the water in the tub.

Ships are made to be drydocked. They get supported on a LOT of blocking. Train cars could copy that. It's otherwise not practical, though.

Ships in drydock are not full of goods.

> Ships are made to be drydocked.

Not while fully loaded with thousands of containers.

Hard enough to snake one rail line through mountainous terrain let alone 8. I can see them building a large railyard in Mexico that sorts incoming containers into separate trains depending on which ship they are destined for.

Building the drydocks capable of submerging the rail cars and positioning the ship above them and then hauling the ship out would be the bigger challenge. Dealing with any slope with that much weight is tricky.

I’m pretty sure once you cede that you’re willing to use the energy required to move a container ships worth of weight from one end of the canal to the other, the cheaper option would be to pump water to refill the locks. Water is easier to transport than ships, and while I don’t think the efficiency of the locks helps much in this context, there might be some clever optimizations… especially if you’re willing to run a ton of high pressure pipe.

Pump it from where though? It would be easy to pump and reuse the water that already goes through the locks, except that it gets mixed with salt water, so putting it back in the lake would quickly contaminate it.

Pumping sea water to the top of the lock chain or maybe the lock next to the top would save a lot of fresh water but would slowly contaminate the lake unless there were some kind of double gate to prevent sea water used to fill the top lock leaking out when a ship enters the lock from the lake.

Solar desalination, perhaps?

Based on the diagram of the locks and water saving basins at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panama_Canal_expansion_project... they could have a second basin D at the same level as basin C. They would pump the fresh water in C that has come down the lock chain back up into the lake. They could pump sea water into D that would be used to fill the bottom lock when a ship is acsending the chain. Then the sea water in the bottom lock would be drained to the sea when a ship descends.

> what if we built say ten parallel railways 10 ft apart and moved cargo ships over the rails?

Interesting concept. Never thought of it before.

The India-Middle East-Europe Economic Corridor (IMEC) has a similar issue. Containers will be offloaded in UAE, then travel via rail through Saudi Arabia and Israel, and then reloaded on to ships in the Mediterranean for a short trip to Greece.

Your idea is much more interesting.

It's a dumb idea, we already have standardized cargo containers and the technology to load/unload them efficiently. Putting a ship on 10 Train Tracks will require the development of new technology and will make every bridge (weight allowance) and tunnel (the profile would need to be big enough for the whole ship) prohibitively expensive. With normal cargo trains, which are a very efficient and cheap way to transport a lot of goods, you can just use cheap off the shelf stuff.

Also transporting ships with their huge tanks of heavy oil is a huge health and safety hazard.

Good reply. You're right, I hadn't thought about bridges / tunnels. Nor about the fact that the current system is basically "cheap off the shelf stuff".

This exchange has been a revelation in systems-design for me. The value one gets from adding another brain with a differing viewpoint.

Something similar to this idea exists in Russia. But for larger river ships only, so smaller scale.

There is a large dam, with generating station, downstream the valley is narrow, walls are steep. Differential to top of dam is large/high. Water locks impractical.

So they've built something like a dock for the ships to enter, dock closes with ship inside, and is moved on cog rails up/downhill for a few miles, including a turntable!

By electromotors, powered by > 100.000V three-phase delivered via catenary from the sides!

At the time this made the rounds trough the net (possibly +20 years) it all looked rather insane/gigantic/impressive.

Wasted 5 minutes trying to find it, seems to be gone. shrug

Krasnoyarsk ship lift?

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

YES! Thank You!

But there was more on sites like rbth, onlyinrussia, or some such. Much more detailed pictures.

This is Krasnoyarsk dam. It is located in small town of Divnogorsk some 40km up the Yenisei river. I was raised in Krasnoyarsk and have seen this with my own eyes.

Thank you!

Can you remember how it did sound when in motion?

Brrrrrrrbrbrbrrrrrrrrrrrrrjhjnjhnjhnnnbrrrr

Nope. I am an old fart living in Canada now and many memories are very rusted ;)

More for pleasure craft than commercial shipping, but I have taken a boat through the big chute marine railway in Ontario. Very cool experience.

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

Often suggested along this very route. Here is a 19th century depiction of a ship being pulled across the isthmus via rail:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isthmus_of_Tehuantepec#Tehuant...

There's precedence for this (on smaller scales), see https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portage#:~:text=Portage%20or....

And https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fitzcarraldo

There's been a rail line there for a century. It's just being improved. It's the port facilities that need major expansion.

Why lift ships? Containers are designed to be easily loaded, unloaded, and carried on various vehicles.

Some people love reinventing rail, but just worse, more expensive and less efficient.

Or perhaps instead of 10x wideing, just build a permanent bidirectional conver belt.

Yeah all they need is a blueprint and the logistics bots will take care of the rest

DoshDorington did something like that… https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HzpUQZIr15g&t=900s&pp=2AGEB5...

Weight wise it looks feasible. The hard part is getting something capable of transferring hundreds of tons that can also conform to hulls of different shapes.

Maybe suspend the ship from dozens of points.

I’d imagine you could weld hooks all around the hull.

If weight is ok, just put a lock on a rail: so boat enters the lock, two gates close behind it, the lock (and one gate) moves via a rail to the other side, reverse at the other ocean.

What if we built Robert Bartini's Ground Effect Aircraft Carrier https://dj423fildxgac.cloudfront.net/fc6b316a-43b4-410f-8de6...

except as a cargo ship^H^H cargo ekranoplan which could cross land as well as ocean?

what's the energy expenditure for an ekranoplan vs a boat per mile?

Whatever it is, it’s surely made up for in coolness-per-mile.

Like the imaginary giant cargo hovercraft from one of Arthur C Clarke’s stories.

It apparently was done in ancient Greece. Look up the Diolkos of Corinth.

Triremes had to be regularly lifted out of the water or they would become waterlogged. They were surprisingly light weight, and could actually be carried onto a beach by their crew.

I literally just asked that on a different related post.

https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=Solvency#38992883

Anyone?

Wow! I like how you think. We should discuss more mega projects.

How fast can modern freight trains run? If they’re twice as fast as cargo ships, maybe we need fewer tracks?

And a longer land route?

Doing 100 mph with a freight train is well possible, if the track can take it.

Though often you want to go slower for less air resistance.

The Ever Given has a maximum speed of 23kt / 42km/h and carries 20,124 TEU or approx. 7660 54-ft containers.

Rail figures are harder to find, but a reasonable guess based on what I can find seems to be 400 containers per train if the loading gauge permits double stacking containers. Speeds over 100km/h are easily achievable on railways without at-grade crossings.

So one ship could easily require ten trains to move all its cargo in the same time, plus the time taken to offload at each end, which I guess is why this hasn't taken off. Though if it's all just transhipped to trains this could be faster than at most ports where containers have to be sorted to different destinations.

Though interestingly with a dedicated right-of-way the trains don't actually need to be manned, remote control freight trains exist.

I could foresee a parallel loading crane to train track system where the cranes take up to 10 or 20 containers at once and then put them on 10 to 20 parallel train track at once on the other side.

Hand counting how wide a panamax gets, they seem to max out at about 19 or 20 containers wide and 15 containers deep. It also looks like shipping containers already can be top latched with this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GZQPxl9zssk

So if you could automate this system at 30m per transfer of 10, a port with 15 cranes could do 300 containers an hour and clear a boat in about 15 hours. You could expand the system further into a full panamax width and do it in about 8 hours per panamax boat with 4500 TEUs.

In practice, the mean speed of a container on a ship is probably close to 10 knots. A freight car would be lucky to mean 5 km/h.

Freight trains run usually at 80-120km/h on railways with at-grade-crossings (for higher speeds you would need better brakes, and more energy which doesn't really make sense for freight). At least in Europe you only need to eliminate at-grade-crossings if you want to run trains over 160km/h

Why not tunnels that don't disrupt and takeover surface environment preventing nature or other infrastructure - and not impacted by weather?

https://www.boringcompany.com

Because it's stupidly expensive boring a Tunnel when you can just do it on the surface. Also Railway lines take up considerably less space than every Street. Weather also rarely impacts rail

Maybe on the surface (pun intended) it appears stupidly expensive in comparison, but I bet if you actually put a value to all of the positives then the cost would at minimum be at par.

With tunnels you can also go 3D, you could go 100 tunnels deep - stacked - increasing capacity on the same line as needed; something Elon points out as part of the traffic congestion problem is that cities went 3D (skyscrapers) but traffic did not.

You build that route through nothing. There is no need for tunnels, and I don't see any positives, that you couldn't remediate much cheaper. For animal movement you can just build huge animal bridges every few hundred meters. Weather is rarely a problem for train operations, tunnels create also a whole lot of new "Negatives". You need evacuation systems, ventilation systems, maintenance etc...

I really would love to see an effort, perhaps best spearheaded by Boring Company themselves, to do a very thorough "feature matrix" of pros and cons and real-life current costs of things depending on the area, e.g. snow removal costs, how much building "huge animal bridges" that allows ecosystem to not be too disrupted, etc.

It's such a complex issue that a fully "complete" overview is necessary, that can be then dove into over weeks or months of time to first study its thoroughness to then be able to decide how accurate or credible it is, and add to or correct it if an incongruence or error or incomplete aspect found.

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