A 100-year-old railway Mexico hopes will rival the Panama Canal (2023)

https://theweek.com/transport/the-100-year-old-railway-mexico-hopes-will-rival-the-panama-canal

by mooreds • 2 years ago

75 119 2 years ago

adolph2• 2 years ago

Its maximum annual cargo capacity would be about 10.5% of the total amount of goods carried through the Panama Canal in 2022, according to calculations from the FT.

Other articles:

The upgraded Coatzacoalcos - Salina Cruz line, as well the ports in both cities, are managed by the state-owned Isthmus of Tehuantepec Railway, part of the Mexican Navy.

https://www.railjournal.com/passenger/main-line/passenger-op...

By 2028, the Isthmus of Tehuantepec Interoceanic Corridor (CIIT) should see 300,000 cargo containers transit every year, with 1.4 million — about 33 million tons — by 2033. The 80-km Panama Canal moved about 63.2 million tons in 2022.

https://www.japantimes.co.jp/business/2023/11/16/mexico-rail...

CaliforniaKarl• 2 years ago

The railroad is a good idea, but the concerns on throughput are real. If it’s a single-track railroad, your consist length (at least in one direction) will be limited by the length of sidings. Every rail car heading east will inevitably head west (to pick up containers).

It’s a big operation, putting together a new container-oriented freight railroad, and I hope it goes well!

IncreasePosts2• 2 years ago

I'm also curious how security will be handled. 300km, mostly through middle-of-nowhere, with potentially high value cargo seems like organized crime's bread and butter

adolph2• 2 years ago

It seemed to work well in Fast Five until there was a plot twist.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fast_Five

wolverine8765• 2 years ago

Organized crime doesn't want attention from people with power to cause them problems.

pphysch• 2 years ago

Scaling a railway (horizontally and vertically) is a lot more doable than scaling a canal, right?

kmlx• 2 years ago

depends on the scale factor. can you scale it 10x to match the canal? probably not.

newaccount74• 2 years ago

6.5 hours for 300km sounds very slow. Is that because it's only a single track, and you lose a lot of time when passing oncoming trains? Or is the track not straight enough for fast trains?

usrusr2• 2 years ago

Why optimize for latency when throughout is your single dominatant metric? And with braking distances being the limiting factor of all train signaling schemes, you might even find yourself able to increase throughput by going slower. (not necessarily of course, but train signaling schemes are ... complicated)

ianburrell• 2 years ago

Freight trains are almost never fast trains. It isn't worth the extra energy for saving hours for containers that have been in transit for days.

The rehabilitation increased the speed from 12mph to 43mph. They are planning passenger train that can reach 50mph. So that is probably limit to the railroad.

aksss3• 2 years ago

I don’t think cargo trains ever go “fast”. But it is slower than normal in the US anyways. I think in US max speed for cargo is like 50 mph / ~75 kph, and this train is going along at 46 kph assuming constant motion. In reality, it’s fast in some segments, dramatically slower in older segments.

According to Wikipedia, it’s an old line that has speed limitations in some areas of 20 kph. Addressing these limitations is a substantial part of the rehabilitation project, aiming to get the speed from 20 kph up to 70 kph.

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

“the rehabilitation is reportedly expected to result in a speed increase for trains using the railway, from 20 kilometres per hour (12 mph) to 70 km/h (43 mph) for cargo trains, and of up to 80 km/h (50 mph) for passenger trains”

bluGill6• 2 years ago

Depends on the cargo. Mail and fresh food goes fast as time matters. Most other freight would prefer to save money with slower speeds.

bluGill6• 2 years ago

The real value is if they have space and equipment to sort. That is unload the containers from one ship and put them on 10 different ships to different ports. With the jones act ships cannot go US port to US port, so small ports are bypassed when if they were used they could improve operations.

bonus if they can connect to rail heading to the middle of the us (think El Paso to Denever)

ch4s33• 2 years ago

The Jones Act is one of those truly infuriating acts of protectionism that absolutely hurts everyone except a small and dwindling number protected producers and doesn't accomplish its stated purpose. It's sad that this sort of policy is once again in vogue.

BurningFrog3• 2 years ago

Maybe those producers could be bought off to end the Jones Act.

As in, every union member gets an immediate pension and $1M cash as part of the legalization.

chiph• 2 years ago

bonus if they can connect to rail heading to the middle of the us

I think this might be where their big advantage would be. The ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach are at capacity (and considered inefficient), and the Mexican container port of Manzanillo further down the coast is only medium-sized (1.4 million TEUs). If Mexico were to build dedicated freight corridors like India has, they could move an amazing amount of cargo into the central US.

julianeon• 2 years ago

This is a good plan. It's not so much that it's amazing on its own, but that the Panama canal is showing signs of weakness and alternatives are needed.

Already the "drought" is causing issues with the Panama canal, and not only is that drought never-ending, it's going to get worse over time (climate change).

Yossarrian22• 2 years ago

Is it? If ocean levels rise doesn’t that just change how they need to handle the locks to balance out water end to end?

fernanf1• 2 years ago

not really, there are ways to get more water stored with dams, and the drought wouldnt have happened if they hadnt decided to just take water from the lakes for consumption, they were built for the canal to work.

wolverine8765• 2 years ago

The OP probably should be changed to the Financial Times article, which the The Week article is summarizing:

https://www.ft.com/content/bbe8e851-e9f2-4ed1-a4a7-051a670b4...

talleyrand• 2 years ago

Gift link: https://on.ft.com/3UcOwKR

WalterBright• 2 years ago

The restoration is part of a "bold bid to steal container traffic" away from the waterway, said the Financial Times.

I doubt that. Isn't the Canal already operating at maximum capacity? The railroad would simply enable more traffic. It's not zero sum.

AlotOfReading• 2 years ago

Long term maybe, but it'll take years for the rest of the logistics network to fully accommodate the new capacity and do things like building more ships or reallocating routes. In the meantime the new ports would probably undercut Panama fees to attract traffic that would otherwise go via the canal.

bluGill6• 2 years ago

Not really as the canal is overfull so anyone in shipping has incentive to see if they can make this work for some shipments now.

Gibbon1• 2 years ago

Friend went through the canal and had to sit for a few days with a bunch of other ships. That's something operators hate. Because any time spent waiting is lost opportunity.

I'm assuming being able to punt and offload and swap cargo would be a welcome alternative for operators. Maybe you spend a day to offload and load new cargo but that would beat waiting two days for a slot to open up at the panama canal.

billfruit2• 2 years ago

Also there is already a railway along the canal, the Panama Canal Railway which connects coast to coast.

BurningFrog3• 2 years ago

That's a much shorter train trip than this Mexico one.

So why isn't this rail line already taking the traffic Mexico hopes for?

berkut• 2 years ago

I think the throughput is currently quite limited because of low levels of water in the natural lakes close to Panama which are used for both Panama's drinking water and for the locks in the canal, so they're restricting the number of ships per day...

usrusr2• 2 years ago

The basic logic is convincing: the canal killed the train line's business long before containers became a thing. Ship-to-train and train-to-ship should be far more feasible today than it used to be back then.

And the train-to-ship part would double as ship-to-ship redistribution, fanning out to different ports in both Asia and on the east coast. Basically a role similar to the one served by Atlanta in the United network.

jedberg2• 2 years ago

I wonder at what point it makes economic sense to "solve" the freshwater problem in Panama with new infrastructure. My understanding is that they lose a lot of water because it has to get flushed out to sea.

Is there an engineering solution to recycling more of the water and flushing less of it to sea?

eppp• 2 years ago

You use big pumps to fill the lock from the low side instead of just opening a valve or the doors slightly. This would then increase the salinity on the lake side and cause whatever problems that would cause.

jedberg2• 2 years ago

What I'm saying is, is there an infrastructure solution that doesn't increase the salinity in the lake? Like can we use gravity up to the last lock, but then pump all the fresh water out back to the lake and then pump seawater into the chamber after it's empty? Or something crazy like that.

jccooper• 2 years ago

The locks are all gravity powered. They certainly could operate the locks by pumping uphill instead of releasing downhill, and thus lose almost no water. I expect the expense of this makes it a non-starter.

fbdab103• 2 years ago

I expect the expense of this makes it a non-starter.

I am seeing numbers that it costs anywhere between $100k-400k per trip to go through the canal, with some tens of ships per day.

So of course, this highly profitable venture would dedicate basically nothing to improving the infrastructure until it became a tire fire.

IvyMike• 2 years ago

It feels like any form of recycling water would mean pumping water back uphill, which is energy-intensive, at least relative to the current model of "just pull water from Lake Gatú and assume it never runs out".

But using less water in the first place, I'm curious what approaches might exist.

jabl• 2 years ago

The new set of locks in the Panama canal use "water-saving basins" to reduce the amount of water lost for each cycle of the locks. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panama_Canal_expansion_project...

I guess in principle something like this could also be retrofitted to the existing locks.

wolverine8765• 2 years ago

From the Financial Times article [0] cited in the OP:

Mexico’s government is bullish about prospects for the rail crossing, which will offer proximity to the US and a transit time of 6.5 hours excluding loading time — less than the eight to 10 hours it takes on the 80km canal.

Much more than transit time, I'm interested in throughput. How long does it take to move a full container ship's contents from one end to the other? How long does it take just to unload and load?

Also, regarding loading/unloading: When I think of a train, I imagine it being loaded/unloaded in semi-serial - first the front cars, then the next set of cars, as the train moves segment-by-segment past the ship. Essentially you are transforming a massive pile of containers onto a long string of containers. Is that correct? Is there any solution to speed it up? I suppose they could lay several train tracks in parallel alongside the ship and use extra train engines to pull up groups of rail cars, and then reconnect them into one long train as the train pulls out. How long is a train carrying a full container ship's capacity?

Cost seems the other essential question: Sea transport costs a fraction of rail transport, generally, but I expect that canal transport is far more expensive than open sea transport.

[0] https://www.ft.com/content/bbe8e851-e9f2-4ed1-a4a7-051a670b4...

bombcar3• 2 years ago

Apparently it takes about 3 days to unload a "full size" container ship.

So this rail isn't going to be tremendously useful unless they connect it directly to the USA.

As for loading the trains, they already do it in parallel; look at an arial photo of a stockyard. For this specific use, you could parallelize it even more I suspect.

jessriedel3• 2 years ago

Yea, I don't really get why the 6.5 hours is particularly pertinent. The unloading time (and expense) will dominate, and any other railroads connecting a Pacific port to an Atlantic port in the Americas that are less than ~2 days transit time will be competitors.

Why does connecting directly to the US help? If you're in one ocean and just want to access the US, can't you just steam direct to a US port?

adrianmonk• 2 years ago

How long is a train carrying a full container ship's capacity?

According to Wikipedia[1], "Container ship capacity is measured in twenty-foot equivalent units (TEU)."

And container ship size categories are (conveniently!) based on what can fit through the Panama Canal. Neopanamax ships are the category that can fit through in the canal's new (upgraded) configuration, and those can hold 10,000 to 14,500 TEU.

For round numbers I'll use 10,000 TEU. That means if you laid all the containers end to end, they would stretch out 200,000 feet, which is about 38 miles or 61 km.

Trains can stack containers two high[2], so divide that by two, and a train has to be at least 19 miles or 30 km. But really somewhat longer since one train car's containers don't butt up directly against the next car's containers.

So presumably they would need multiple trains for one ship's cargo.

---

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Container_ship

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Double-stack_rail_transport

wolverine8765• 2 years ago

Afaik, some container ships are made much larger than what will fit through the Panama Canal. If you are shipping from China to anywhere in the Indo-Pacific, you don't need to worry about canals.

m463• 2 years ago

How long does it take just to unload and load?

If it is more than 8-10 hours, you start getting overlapped I/O.

As to parallelization, I wonder how much of the route is a single track. Parallel tracks could allow coming and going without interference. (then there are siding and crossover tracks, etc)

I also wonder - do you have to unload EVERYTHING? maybe just the express cargo, while the rest of the ship waits.

Or you could combine ship cargo and one ship could make the long trip, while others return back across the pacific.

runjake7• 2 years ago

The article mentions absolutely nothing about this, but what about the security plan?

This is going to sound snarky, but I genuinely look forward to how this operates with the current state of the Mexico government, lawlessness, cartels, and in that particular area, insurgents.

Bad actors are not going to simply ignore the value, there.

I would really love to see Mexico become a rich country with a functional and less-corrupt government/military/law enforcement. That seems insurmountable within a generation, though.

bhhaskin• 2 years ago

Insurance companies aren't going to want to touch that with a 10 foot pole.

iso8859-12• 2 years ago

Simply not true. You can buy insurance for cargo to/from Mexico shipment right now on https://exfreight.com/ . Powered by Haskell. Parcels, LCL, FCL, you name it.

pstuart• 2 years ago

I would really love to see Mexico become a rich country with a functional and less-corrupt government/military/law enforcement. That seems insurmountable within a generation, though.

Amen to that. That will never happen as long as we continue The War on Drugs™ -- and that appears to be an impossible habit to kick.

runjake7• 2 years ago

The War on Drugs is a failed strategy, but I don't know of another way to tackle the problem of drugs and geography, WRT the US.

Decriminalizing hard drugs has been a failed experiment in Oregon, where hard drug use shot up drastically.

nradov• 2 years ago

While the war on drugs has largely been a failure, it's too late for US drug policy changes to bring down the Mexican cartels. Even if the US government completely legalized all drugs (not something I necessarily support) the cartels would remain. Mexico is a failed state where the central government no longer even tries to exercise control over large parts of their nominal territory.

yonaguska• 2 years ago

As long as the right cartels are able to skim value, I could see this being successful regardless. Cartels are businesses at the end of the day- and they won't totally destroy an industry as long as it's making them money long term. The problems occur when smaller groups start fighting over access to the resources.

runjake7• 2 years ago

That's one of the many problems with cartels: they fight over control of valuable resources. Occasionally a single cartel gets a firm hold onto something and right about then, the US government swoops in to decapitate the leadership, re-initiating a war. I.e. What happened with CDS and CJNG after El Chapo's extradition to the US.

Also, if a certain skim percentage becomes acceptable loss to all parties, the cartels will want more.

iso8859-12• 2 years ago

Morena is slated to win the election in June because of the perception that infrastructure projects are getting done. Sheinbaum will want to get re-elected, and if the railway gets robbed that will be difficult. It's a lot easier to protect a railway than to create a good civil society with jobs for millions of people.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fourth_Transformation#Infrastr...

AtlasBarfed• 2 years ago

Whether it be by demographics, credit collapse, Taiwan invastion, or just authoritarian incompetence, the world and especially the US are moving away from China-centric manufacturing.

The US needs to get its drug war policy in line, but so much is on the line that I think the cartels are going to become a point of "special emphasis" in the coming decade. Mexico is going to become the center of manufacturing for the US in all likelihood.

The cartel/drug civil war will come to an end as part of a broad sweep of investment and interest by the United States. I just don't see the cartels maintaining their political/corruption power when the stakes become so much higher.

The cartels either need to legitimize, or they'll probably get a healthy dose of US military forces attention and be ground to dust.

sofixa• 2 years ago

For those not intimately familiar with Mexican politics: Morena is a political party (according to Wikipedia, "left wing and anti-neoliberal"). The current president of Mexico is from them

Sheinbaum is the current governor of Mexico city, and candidate and frontrunner for the upcoming presidential elections.

Note: Mexico doesn't do presidential reelections - even temporary holders of the post can never run for or hold it again. They had a number of civil wars and related fights around this so it's taken very seriously.

sgift• 2 years ago

How is the security situation in Mexico these days? I only hear vague "the cartels are taking over" news from time to time, but it's not really something I've looked into in depth. Security is probably a big topic for such an endeavor though. If the companies have to fear that they loose their shipments they won't use it.

jasonpeacock2• 2 years ago

An average container ship holds 15,000 containers. An average train holds 400 containers. That's 37.5 trains to move the cargo from _one_ ship.

Plus the time to unload and load all those containers (3-4days). I don't see rail competing with the canal.

Edit: On average there are 7.5 container ships transiting the Panama canal per day. And it takes 8-10 hours to transit ocean-to-ocean.

tastyfreeze• 2 years ago

That all depends on price. If it is dirt cheap per container compared to the canal it would get used.

wolverine8765• 2 years ago

Sea transport costs order(s) of magnitude than land transport. I don't know about canal transport.

CivBase• 2 years ago

But the rail solution probably scales a lot better. After all, train tracks are much easier to build than canals.

If you can get dozens of trains from coast to coast in the time it takes to get one caego ship through the canal, that could end up being significantly more economical - and maybe even faster - in the long run.

jasonpeacock2• 2 years ago

It's 8-10 hours to transit the canal. Assuming a train is faster, you'd still need almost 40 trains to carry the same number of containers...are 40 trains still faster in total?

Sure, you could scale it and build 10 train tracks side-by-side (whoa!) which would support 5 trains in each direction, and then you'd only need to get 8 trains faster in total.

And that's disregarding the 3-4 days needed on either end to unload/load the ships.

fransje262• 2 years ago

But the rail solution probably scales a lot better.

Not really, no.

It takes 3 to 4 days to unload 1 ship, and we can assume it takes about the same time to reload them on the other side. Let's be generous, and assume that we can put the entire load on one train, that has an average speed of 40 km/h. That will be an other 8 hours gone to get from harbor A to harbor B. So, for one ship, you went from a 10 hour crossing, to 8+ days of loading-train-travel-unloading.

Now for the logistics part. If one ship holds 15,000 containers, and a train carries 400 containers, you need 38 trains to transfer 1 ship worth of containers.

In 2022, 19 ships a day passed through the Panama canal, per direction. So you would need 722 trains to process the same capacity.

You have 1440 minutes in a day, so to absorb the the incoming freight, you will need a train every 2 minutes on a single track, 24 hours a day. Which, is completely unrealistic. You can double the track, and now you have a 4 minute slot in between trains, per track. Still completely unrealistic. If you would have 5 tracks per direction, you can get to a 10 minute slot in between trains, 24 hours a day, which is still not realistic.

So, in conclusion, we can say that the rail solution does not scale better.

ChrisArchitect• 2 years ago

Discussion from January:

Mexico building rail rival as water shortages drain Panama Canal

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38991317

dang• 2 years ago

Thanks! Macroexpanded:

Mexico building rail rival as water shortages drain Panama Canal - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38991317 - Jan 2024 (107 comments)

simple10• 2 years ago

The first time I heard about the railway was a couple months ago from a RealLifeLore YT video. It goes into a lot more detail and is worth adding to your watch queue if you're into the engineering of global trade.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=glR7lvtrGRI

webwielder2• 2 years ago

Ha! As soon as I saw the article I thought, “I wonder if there’s a RealLifeLore video on this.”

billfruit2• 2 years ago

Isn't there already a railway along the canal? The Panama Canal Railway? Is it not used to ship containers from ocean to Ocean?

mmazing• 2 years ago

No map?

credit_guy2• 2 years ago

This will never work. A typical Panamax ship carries 4800 containers. A typical freight train carries 240. You need 20 trains for each ship; at 2km per train, that’s a continuous line of 40km. In reality trains need at least 10km between them, so that’s 240km. But you need slack in the system, otherwise any hiccup results in a huge jam. So realistically the maximum capacity of such a railway is one Panamax per day and direction. What fees can you charge to cover the operating costs and the capital financing costs? And to hope to be competitive with the canal?

GuardianCaveman• 2 years ago

Can’t they just build parallel railways?

credit_guy2• 2 years ago

They certainly can, but to build two you first build one. And if that one is not profitable, why would adding another one make it so? You could say that building 2 parallel tracks is not significantly more expensive than building one, and when you have the 2 you need less slack in the system, so you can have closer to 100% utilization rate. Yes, you could gain some economies of scale, but the fundamental problem remains: if you cross the canal, you just float on water; if you decide to use this alternative, you need to unload the ship, load 20 trains, run the trains for 300 km, unload them and load them on another ship. To be competitive with the canal, you need to do this for about $200k. The $200k should cover the operating costs (fuel, labor, equipment depreciation), the maintenance costs, the insurance costs, the capital costs and hopefully should include some profit.

A 100-year-old railway Mexico hopes will rival the Panama Canal (2023)

Related Stories