[HN Gopher] Mexico building rail rival as water shortages drain ...
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Mexico building rail rival as water shortages drain Panama Canal
Author : wglb
Score : 71 points
Date : 2024-01-14 15:35 UTC (7 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.japantimes.co.jp)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.japantimes.co.jp)
| gnabgib wrote:
| https://archive.is/osMAZ
| jedberg wrote:
| So 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 wrote:
| Another 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 wrote:
| Ooooh 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 wrote:
| Given 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
| jedberg wrote:
| This is a good point. They could have multiple rail yards
| that all feed into the one main transcontinental railroad.
| vidarh wrote:
| See 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-...
| Brian_K_White wrote:
| Two ships running two smaller loops is no problem at all vs two
| ships running two longer loops.
| jedberg wrote:
| Sure, 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 wrote:
| >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 wrote:
| If 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 wrote:
| Generally 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 wrote:
| 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
| DylanDmitri wrote:
| 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.
| bilsbie wrote:
| Maybe suspend the ship from dozens of points.
|
| I'd imagine you could weld hooks all around the hull.
| seanmcdirmid wrote:
| 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.
| Solvency wrote:
| I literally just asked that on a different related post.
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=Solvency#38992883
|
| Anyone?
| bilsbie wrote:
| Wow! I like how you think. We should discuss more mega
| projects.
| nadermx wrote:
| Or perhaps instead of 10x wideing, just build a permanent
| bidirectional conver belt.
| asylteltine wrote:
| Yeah all they need is a blueprint and the logistics bots will
| take care of the rest
| FrancoisBosun wrote:
| DoshDorington did something like that... https://www.youtub
| e.com/watch?v=HzpUQZIr15g&t=900s&pp=2AGEB5...
| dave333 wrote:
| 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.
| profsummergig wrote:
| > 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.
| melling wrote:
| 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?
| inglor_cz wrote:
| Doing 100 mph with a freight train is well possible, if the
| track can take it.
| bluGill wrote:
| Though often you want to go slower for less air resistance.
| sitharus wrote:
| 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.
| novok wrote:
| 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.
| closewith wrote:
| 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.
| foota wrote:
| There's precedence for this (on smaller scales), see https://en
| .m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portage#:~:text=Portage%20or....
| LargoLasskhyfv wrote:
| 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_
| unyttigfjelltol wrote:
| Krasnoyarsk ship lift?
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Krasnoyarsk_ship_lift
| LargoLasskhyfv wrote:
| YES! Thank You!
|
| But there was more on sites like rbth, onlyinrussia, or
| some such. Much more detailed pictures.
| FpUser wrote:
| 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.
| LargoLasskhyfv wrote:
| Thank you!
|
| Can you remember how it did sound when in motion?
| throwuwu wrote:
| 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.
| dessimus wrote:
| 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.
| bdcravens wrote:
| Just build a giant bathtub and tow that /s
| lokjhfvvv wrote:
| If it's stupid and it works... !
| fotta wrote:
| Reminds me of the Falkirk Wheel
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Falkirk_Wheel
| elric wrote:
| Or the huge boat lift of Strepy-Thieu:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Str%C3%A9py-Thieu_boat_lift
| pseingatl wrote:
| There'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 wrote:
| Water shortages? I thought the canal connected oceans and I
| thought the oceans were rising?
| 8note wrote:
| It'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
| Cpoll wrote:
| The canal is 25m above sea level at parts.
| myself248 wrote:
| The 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 wrote:
| Just 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.
| idlephysicist wrote:
| I was also confused by this, I had always (perhaps naively)
| assumed that the canal used salt water throughout. I did some
| searching and found this article.
|
| > Gatun Lake, which forms a key stretch of the canal system and
| provides fresh water for its locks, saw little rain this year,
| as El Nino triggered a withering drought.
|
| https://fortune.com/2023/12/04/panama-canal-dry-backed-up-br...
| bsdpufferfish wrote:
| The American engineers who designed and built this are long
| gone.
|
| Gatun lake was an artificial construction of the project.
| downrightmike wrote:
| They use freshwater from a man made lake, and over the decades,
| silt has reduced capacity and then they have been in a massive
| drought for years. they have no real reclamation from the locks
| back into the lake, so each trip wastes a ton of water. Really,
| they should just charge enough to reflect reality and then most
| ship with just go to the west coast
| mlinksva wrote:
| Thin article, lots more at
| 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
| jp57 wrote:
| For 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 wrote:
| This Economist article on the same topic seems to agree with
| you: https://www.economist.com/the-americas/2024/01/09/the-
| dwindl... / 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 wrote:
| The economist article also mentioned just going north around
| Canada
| reactordev wrote:
| So clearly they don't know what they are talking about. Any
| sailor would tell you, you don't go above and below 55
| degrees. Granted these are steel container ships but the
| seas don't care. What's one or two lost containers of
| goods? They sit just below the water surface for the next
| vessel to crash into.
|
| The Panama Canal has two paths. Only one can be used for
| container ships. Even that has been at capacity for quite
| some time. A more integrated shipping supply chain is
| needed to get goods from A to Z. Rail, truck, boat, and
| plane.
| philipov wrote:
| > _The Panama Canal has two paths. Only one can be used
| for container ships._
|
| I believe both Panamax and Neopanamax lanes can be used
| by most container ships. The Neopanamax lane can
| accommodate the biggest _new_ container ships in addition
| to that.
| jefftk wrote:
| _> Any sailor would tell you, you don't go above and
| below 55 degrees._
|
| Elaborate? There are major ports north of 55deg and the
| US, Russia, Canada, Sweden, Norway, Iceland, the UK etc.
| bluGill wrote:
| Even with global warming you cannot expect the north around
| Canada path to be open every summer. It will be closed most
| of the year even in the best case. Maybe you can attempt it
| some years but it isn't a reliable route worth considering.
| bluGill wrote:
| Sea transport is cheap but slow. Mexico is much narrower than
| the US so they can potentially be faster than the Canal without
| adding much more costs. Going LA to the east cost is done, but
| has more expensive land transport. So this could be a useful
| compromise. If (big if that I have no confidence in, but still
| possible) Mexico puts in great sorting they can also take
| containers from on ship and sort them into several others to
| various ports on the east coast.
|
| Is it worth it? Hard to say. Sea transport is cheap, but not
| free. There is a lot of opportunity to reduce the costs of move
| switches by automation. However thee biggest advantage to this
| really only an come if they can sort containers to different
| destinations.
| cjensen wrote:
| After 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 wrote:
| Presumably posted due to this comment yesterday:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38988611
| z3ugma wrote:
| Irreverent and funny firsthand look at the Corredor Interoceanico
| 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-interocea...
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