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Comment by xenadu02 | Hacker News Reader

Believe it or not, sometimes products are unloaded on one coast, transported by rail, then loaded on a ship on the other coast.

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> Believe it or not, sometimes products are unloaded on one coast, transported by rail, then loaded on a ship on the other coast.

That is surprising, since shipping by water is dramatically cheaper than any other form of surface shipping, even factoring the extra distance to sail down to the Panama Canal. What's the point of adding the land leg?

Maybe because the canal is too small? Prior to the opening of the new locks in 2016, the largest container ship that could fit through the Panama Canal was pretty small by modern standards. And even with the new locks opened some ships still have to go around the horn.

Shipping via Panama doubles the distance, and it's probably half the speed as well. Some products will likely benefit from shaving off two or three weeks from China to the EU.

Why would you ever go through America to ship something from China to the EU? (which are 6/7 time zones apart vs 17/18 going in the other direction)

Northern China -> UK by container is like in the neighborhood of 5+ weeks.

China -> US is around 2 weeks, US -> EU is around 1 week.

So depending on where it was coming from, might make sense?

I dunno enough about the routes.

Speed, maybe? I don't know offhand if it's faster or not, but if it is, I can imagine that spending more to get the products to their destination faster could be worth it in some scenarios.

Isn't passage through the Panama Canal expensive?

Expensive in absolute terms, yes.

Based on the calculator here:

https://www.wilhelmsen.com/tollcalculators/panama-toll-calcu...

It costs $1,196,397.54 for the largest possible ship to go though.

That's for 13,000 TEUs though (so 6500 standard containers) That's $184 per container. Now think about how much a container holds, and per item for sale it becomes pretty cheap.

My Costa Rican brother-in-law was just telling me that a couple Central American countries are working on new canals because the Panama canal is fairly saturated.

Because if you're in Kansas, there is no water route to the Pacific Ocean?

The original quote was this:

> sometimes products are unloaded on one coast, transported by rail, then loaded on a ship on the other coast.

Not sure how Kansas is relevant...

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