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I've long pictured a rail canal, wherein loaded boats enter a drydock carriage, which whisks them over land to the other side. In my head, this works like a sk
by klyrs 3y ago
I've long pictured a rail canal, wherein loaded boats enter a drydock carriage, which whisks them over land to the other side. In my head, this works like a ski lift with two parallel tracks running side by side. Alas, I am a lowly software engineer and the sheer scale of the ships involved is entirely out of my experience.
- gizajob 3y agoCheck out the movie “Fitzcarraldo” by Werner Hertzog!
- klyrs 3y agoYou've hit the nail on the head, that's about my expectation for how my large-scale civil engineering ideas would go in real life. Even making the movie was a shitshow.
- pests 3y agoModern super container ships can hold 24,000 containers each of which is 20ft long. If you were to line these up end to end it would be 96 miles long. The Panama Canal is only 50 miles long. You could do it but the entire length of the track would be completely full of containers twice over. I somehow feel it would not be cost effective in the long run.
- oh_sigh 3y agoOP is talking about loading the entire boat onto rails, not the containers themselves.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- hef19898 3y agoContainer on rails is a viable alternative for goods shipped from and to China. Used pretty extensively, but more expensive than sea freight (which is basically unbeatable cost wise).
- DiggyJohnson 3y agoFWIW, your numbers are off by a factor of two: Panamax ships carry up to 5,000 TEUs; Neo-Panamax, introduced after the canal's expansion, 14,000. Beyond that, I think OP was referring to a hypothetical piece of infrastructure that would dwarf anything we've ever built on this planet: drydocking the entire loaded ship and moving it across Panama on a massive rail system capable of moving entire ships across the land.
- pests 3y agoDuh, I totally forgot about ships being built for certain canal sizes and just went with the maximum I can find.
- kps 3y agoAncient Greece had a paved road used to haul ships across the Isthmus of Corinth. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diolkos https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diolkos
- carl_dr 3y agoThese things weigh up to 120,000 tonnes - that isn’t something that’s going to move on road or rail.
- wizzwizz4 3y agoSo make them as big as the infrastructure supports? That's what's happened with cargo ships purpose-built for the Panama Canal.
- Detrytus 3y agoSo basically: build a port and a train station at both ends, and move containers through railway?
- marcosdumay 3y agoNo, the GP meant to reduce the ships sizes until it's viable. TBH, I have no idea how a rail compares to a canal in terms of terrain pressure and building viability. Without further information, it's a promising alternative that is very obviously limited by the (area) density of those ships, but obviously a major investment. Somehow, the ship is able to sustain its weight, so it's not an absurd idea, but they can just barely sustain it, so it's only a just barely not absurd of an idea.
- qup 3y agowe'll put a portable pool on the rails. float em across. it only increases the complexity a little.
- 3y ago
- xeromal 3y agoThere was a rail canal roughly along the current canal the the US made prior to finishing the canal.
- jcranmer 3y agoA regular railroad, not a rail canal as GP was suggesting. Such a rail canal was suggested for the Isthmus of Tehuantepec, though (the narrow waist of Mexico): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isthmus_of_Tehuantepec#/media/File:Mining_and_Scientific_Press_-_March_28_1885_-_Interoceanic_Ship_Railway_(206).png https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isthmus_of_Tehuantepec#/media/...