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Comment by dragonelite | Hacker News Reader

Makes me wonder how much the BRI land routes can compete on cargo/shipment prices these days. I saw Russia jokingly promote the northern route when Suez was jammed by the Evergreen.

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Trains are going to have a hard time competing with container ships just because they’re so much narrower and shorter so they have to go much much longer to move the same amount of cargo. Trains are practically one dimensional compared to the big container ships and rail yards don’t have the space for miles long trains.

Cargo trains are much longer than container ships (at least in the US). The average train is over a mile long, and trains that are 3 or more miles long are not uncommon. A single ship is of course still going to carry a lot more cargo, but don't underestimate the throughput of trains.

https://www.gao.gov/assets/gao-19-443.pdf

Trains actually get a lot closer to container ships than I had expected. With double stacking you can get up to about 1000 TEU per mile of train. Big container ships are generally about 20,000 TEU.

For posterity: I messed up the calculation, it's a little less than 500 TEU per mile of train (double stacked).

True, trains are narrower and shorter. They can go longer, but what they really can do is be more frequent. A well-run double-track railroad can move 70 or 80 trains a day with not much difficulty. But you can't put 70 or 80 container ships through a port in a day.

You have to compare the destination railyard instead of the tracks. The tracks are equivalent to the sea and the port is equivalent to the railyard. They can distribute closer to the destination though but the tracks are more of a throughput limit point to point than the sea is.

Even so, it's easier to expand a railyard (or build a new one) than it is to expand a port.

True generally but it depends a lot on where you're trying to put the new rail yard. They'd need to be bigger to accommodate similar TEU numbers which means along the coasts you're going to have a lot more trouble finding the land to build the sprawling rail yards it'd require to move similar amounts of containers.

In the USA, 3 mile long trains are becoming common on many long distance routes. But that's still only about 700 TEU single stacked.

That’s a positively tiny ship by comparison. This is a 1500 TEU ship for an example.

https://www.marinetraffic.com/en/ais/details/ships/shipid:65...

This 700 TEU ship is only 122mx18mx7m.

https://shipselector.com/offers/sale/cargo-ship/container-sh...

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