4 ms·
That’s nuts. Carrying cargo ships by rail is going to require huge locomotives
by Erratic6576 3y ago
That’s nuts. Carrying cargo ships by rail is going to require huge locomotives
- taspeotis 3y agoIt’s carrying cargo ships’ cargo… shipping containers.
- littlestymaar 3y agoWoosh
- Y-bar 3y agoThat’s clearly not the sound a cargo ship makes when travelling by rail across Mexico.
- kylehotchkiss 3y agoEspecially 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
- labrador 3y agoNot a bad idea. There's nothing preventing us from building a rail line large enough to carry a cargo ship.
- Cthulhu_ 3y agoNot a new idea either, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portage https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portage comes up but I'm sure I've seen much bigger versions.
- geraldhh 3y agoprobably not a good idea at all
- jeffreygoesto 3y agohttps://imdb.com/title/tt0083946/ https://imdb.com/title/tt0083946/ Joke aside... RoRo has much quicker transfer but ship capacities are much smaller.
- lcuff 3y agoGulp: 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.
- mgiampapa 3y agoYou 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.
- lcuff 3y agoThe 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?
- bluGill 3y agoCanales 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.
- wongarsu 3y agoIn 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
- jcranmer 3y agoThat's only true for the locks.
- bregma 3y agoYou're gonna need a bigger boat train.
- foobarian 3y agoAt that point it might as well make sense to dig an actual waterway connecting the two oceans.
- jcrawfordor 3y agoNot 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.
- fransje26 3y agoSo.. 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..
- jcrawfordor 3y agoNot 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.
- EasyMark 3y agoso kind of like memory? "unused rail is wasted rail"