7 ms·
Mexico building rail rival as water shortages drain Panama Canal
- gnabgib 3y agohttps://archive.is/osMAZ https://archive.is/osMAZ
- jedberg 3y agoSo one ship will have to unload on one side and then another ship will have to pick up the cargo on the other end? So the shipping company has to have two ships, one on each side, and wait for the loading and unloading? I'm sure smarter people than me have worked this out but it seems like this would take a lot longer than the canal (which only takes 8-10 hours vs 7 hours for this train plus load and unload). Granted ships without reservations have to wait 2-20 days to transit the canal right now, but I suspect wait times for cranes at each end of this rail would be about the same as canal wait times if not longer. Maybe a shipping expert can chime in here?
- nickpinkston 3y agoAnother possible way this project could be beneficial is if the Panama Canal can't widen its locks, and hence this project could enable ships larger than that (which are more fuel efficient / cheaper) to have a far faster and possibly cheaper (depends on their costs, etc.) route.
- myself248 3y agoOoooh that's an aspect I hadn't considered. Post-Panamax ships tend to be 2x-3x more TEUs and they continue to grow. Eeeenteresting. Plus if they're already offloading to land in the Americas, don't just put 'em onto another ship and sail up to LAX, a rail route up through Mexico itself could mean the containers arrive directly into the US without going through LAX, which has interesting implications for labor.
- dave333 3y agoGiven multiple source ports and destination ports having the ability to sort containers is useful. Similar to Fedex/Airline hub and spoke models. Also why there is a huge railyard in North Platte. https://youtu.be/zgpMRY1gAzw?si=-zNXLdLor5bt_0vQ https://youtu.be/zgpMRY1gAzw?si=-zNXLdLor5bt_0vQ
- jedberg 3y agoThis is a good point. They could have multiple rail yards that all feed into the one main transcontinental railroad.
- vidarh 3y agoSee e.g. [1]. As long as the Panama Canal is at capacity, they don't need to compete with the Panama Canal. They need to compete with long detours: > The Panama Canal has become so backlogged that the world’s largest operator of chemical tankers has decided to reroute its fleet to the Suez Canal. > London-based Stolt-Nielsen, which has a tanker division with 166 ships, is charging customers additional costs for the longer route, it said in an email. A bottleneck at the Panama Canal due to low water levels has prompted shippers to divert to Suez, the Cape of Good Hope, or even through the Strait of Magellan off the tip of South America. And so, presumably, they're assuming that irrespective of resolution of these immediate issues, the Panama Canal won't be able to keep up with demand. [1] https://fortune.com/2023/11/27/panama-canal-backed-up-water-shortage-ships-reroute/ https://fortune.com/2023/11/27/panama-canal-backed-up-water-...
- Brian_K_White 3y agoTwo ships running two smaller loops is no problem at all vs two ships running two longer loops.
- jedberg 3y agoSure, as long as you have an even number of ships in your fleet and they can be paired off to carry the same number of containers. It's certainly solvable but adds a whole new level of logistical planning to make sure there is a suitable ship available and empty to receive the containers at the other end.
- s1artibartfast 3y ago>I suspect wait times for cranes at each end of this rail would be about the same as canal wait times if not longer. This is the wrong way to think about it. Wait times would naturally start at zero days, and then increase from there until there is no more demand or the comparative advantage runs out.
- Zacru 3y agoIf you're shipping from northern hemisphere to northern hemisphere, then you also save to time/fuel to go down to Panama. No idea if that's significant or not.
- bluGill 3y agoGenerally you wouldn't have two ships, you would have dozens. This only makes sense if you sort. There are many ports across the Pacific, and many other ports on the east coast (include South American and the Caribbean!). Dozens of ships from different ports cross the Pacific and unload. Then the containers get mixed and matched with dozens of other ships on the other side going to dozens of different ports. And the reverse for the return trips. Note that the ships do not all need to be owned by the same company, the important part is the containers get where they need to be. Sometimes they are, but container logistics is often separate and even when not the shipping companies will use each other when needed to get their containers where the customer needs them.
- bilsbie 3y agoSurely 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 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 https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Honghai_Crane
- DylanDmitri 3y agoWeight 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.
- bilsbie 3y agoMaybe suspend the ship from dozens of points. I’d imagine you could weld hooks all around the hull.
- seanmcdirmid 3y agoIf 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.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- Solvency 3y agoI literally just asked that on a different related post. https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=Solvency#38992883 https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=Solvency#38992883 Anyone?
- 3y ago
- pseingatl 3y agoThere's already a trans-isthmus railroad running from Atlantic to the Pacific in Panama. There's an oil pipeline as well. The water shortage is not going to get resolved anytime soon and is a result of the third locks project, a project that did not provide for increased water for transits. Another issue is that containers stacked on top of vessel decks are not counted for the purposes of calculating vessel tolls. In essence, they ride for free. Unloading and loading individual containers means someone will have to start paying for their interoceanic trip.
- Brian_K_White 3y agoWater shortages? I thought the canal connected oceans and I thought the oceans were rising?
- Cpoll 3y agoThe canal is 25m above sea level at parts.
- 8note 3y agoIt's sourced from a lake, which allows for moving locks to get between oceans that have different heights. The oceans don't actually touch each other
- myself248 3y agoThe canal forms a ladder that raises ships from one ocean, up through a series of locks, into waterways that cross over the middle of the isthmus, then back down the other side. The canal itself it not all at sea level. Locks work by controlling the release of water from a high point to a low point. The water needs to already be at the high point, by tapping a river or something that's fed by rain; locks do not have pumps to supply their own water. To raise a ship, you pull it into the lock, close the doors on the low side, and open a valve that lets water from the high side flow into the lock and float the ship up. Then you open the doors on the high side. To lower a ship, you pull it into the lock from the high side, close the doors on the high side, and open a valve that lets water from the lock flow to the low side. Then open the doors on the low side and pull the ship out. The low side of one lock is the high side of the next one, so that water basically follows the ship and gets lowered with it as it descends the ladder. But the water has to get to the high middle somehow.
- redleader55 3y agoJust adding a few small details here: 1. When the canal was built, it was deemed to hard and expensive to dig at the level of the two oceans so they imagined the locks system as a solution for that. Back then, the canal was built with US money in a time of conflict between Panama(which was part of Colombia) and Colombia. Today Panama is an independent country, but they don't have the finances to upgrade the canal. 2. They don't want to bring water from the ocean up the canal is because the canal gets its water from a series of fresh water lakes. Bringing salty water would kill the life in the lakes are around the lakes and cause a lot more problems long term.
- mlinksva 3y agoThin article, lots more at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interoceanic_Corridor_of_the_Isthmus_of_Tehuantepec https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interoceanic_Corridor_of_the_I... including a map and plans going back to 1837 and the official site https://www.gob.mx/ciit https://www.gob.mx/ciit
- jp57 3y agoFor containers headed to the US east coast from the Pacific, is there any advantage of using this route and incurring two extra mode switches (sea->rail->sea), over going to a US west coast port and just incurring one (and possibly zero) extra mode switches? Given that the containers may be distributed in a variety of modes when they are unloaded at a land port (e.g. different trains, trucks, etc), it's probably reasonable to think about fractional mode switches. I.e. what's the average number of switches across all containers on the ship. Using a rail portage to get to from the Pacific to the Atlantic will add 2 to that number for every container, whereas going to a west coast port might add one or maybe zero (I.e. switch to a truck that drives cross country, vs rail->truck) Is the increased cost of transcontinental land transport in the US so high as to make this scheme worthwhile for US East coast?
- livueta 3y agoThis Economist article on the same topic seems to agree with you: https://www.economist.com/the-americas/2024/01/09/the-dwindling-of-the-panama-canal-boosts-rival-trade-routes https://www.economist.com/the-americas/2024/01/09/the-dwindl... / https://archive.is/ZU0ws https://archive.is/ZU0ws > But projects like CIIT may still struggle to entice cargo away from the Panama Canal. The largest vessels that go through it can carry 14,000 containers. Mexico’s government accurately reckons that the coast-to-coast rail journey will be quicker than passing through the canal. But it neglects to mention that the trains’ capacity and the speed at which they can be loaded and unloaded mean that the overall rate of goods’ transit between the two oceans will be much slower than the canal. > Moreover, Niels Rasmussen, chief shipping analyst at Bimco, an industry association, says that carrying cargo by train or road has big snags. Most shippers would prefer to rack up extra miles on other maritime routes than to deal with the hassle of unloading and reloading. And if push comes to shove, many would probably prefer existing routes across the United States to untested road alternatives in Latin America.
- intrasight 3y agoThe economist article also mentioned just going north around Canada
- cjensen 3y agoAfter a quick glance at maps, it looks like they will also need to build docks and container facilities in both ports. This isn't a terrible idea, but it's costly and requires a lot more than "building a railway."
- schiffern 3y agoPresumably posted due to this comment yesterday: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38988611 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38988611
- z3ugma 3y agoIrreverent and funny firsthand look at the Corredor Interoceánico from a railroad engineer who consulted on the first trainsets. > Well There‘s Your Problem > This is a podcast about engineering disasters and systemic failures, from a leftist perspective, with jokes https://wtyppod.podbean.com/e/episode-143-corredor-interoceanico/ https://wtyppod.podbean.com/e/episode-143-corredor-interocea...
- shiroiuma 3y agoThey should build the railway underground to avoid the environmental issues being complained about.
- RagnarD 3y agoI'm wondering why the whole thing is an issue anyway. Why is there a water shortage? There's an entire ocean on both sides of the canal. Gatun Lake provides the water buffer for the canal. Currently it's freshwater based but it's also artificial to begin with. Why not transition to using salt water pumped from the oceans to top it off as needed? Seems a hell of a lot easier than trying to replace the canals with rails.
- timeagain 3y agoGatún Lake is 425 km^2. It provides the drinking water for Panama City. It has a watershed covering a large portion of the country. You might be underestimating the scale of the problem.
- RagnarD 3y agoA refinement of the thought, then, would be to install a small modular nuclear reactor to power desalination plants to replenish the freshwater when needed. Panama City must also be threatened if the lake level is that low.
- creer 3y agoIt's not the lake that needs to be filled. Just the locks - and the lower ones at that.
- jodrellblank 3y ago"Every ship traversing the canal between the Atlantic and Pacific oceans requires 50 million gallons of fresh water"[1]. And it can transit 40 ships per day[2]. So, lifting 2 billion gallons of water, just over 9 billion litres, up to the 26 metres altitude of Gatun Lake. Wondering how plausible that is, the numbers match very closely to the Dinorwig pumped-storage hydroelectric power plant in the UK[3], which stores ~9.2GWh of energy by pumping 9.2 million cubic metres of water, 9.2 billion litres, up 536 metres to Marchlyn Mawr reservoir. And it takes 7 hours to do that[4]. If the same amount of water has to be lifted only ~5% of the height, assume 5% of the energy, that would be ~450MWh/day for the Panama Canal. I see it wouldn't be good to dump ocean water into Gatun Lake, but could the lowest locks of freshwater be pumped back up, instead of released into the ocean? [1] https://ctmirror.org/2023/08/27/the-panama-canal-is-running-out-of-water/ https://ctmirror.org/2023/08/27/the-panama-canal-is-running-... [2] https://www.marineinsight.com/guidelines/10-important-panama-canals-facts-everyone-should-know/ https://www.marineinsight.com/guidelines/10-important-panama... [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dinorwig_Power_Station# https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dinorwig_Power_Station# [4] https://www.thegreenage.co.uk/cos/dinorwig-hydroelectric-plant/ https://www.thegreenage.co.uk/cos/dinorwig-hydroelectric-pla...