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Comment by AdamN | Hacker News Reader

Rail/Road doesn't compare to ships in terms of throughput by weight so the land route to China from Russia, even if the freight train system were robust, would not handle the same amounts that a trans-oceanic route like China to the Americas could handle (or even China to St. Petersburg if that were needed)

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The simple railroad idea is “big ship comes to west Panama, unloads onto trains, which load into big ship in east Panama” but that avoids the strength of railroads.

You have to unload the ship eventually anyway, so you instead have it load into rail and disperse to final destination more directly.

You’d need a heat map of where everything ends up that is going through Panama, but if you’re dumping to rail many of those ships would unload elsewhere.

Or in other words, Europe will be hit much harder by this than the USA will.

Panama has a tiny railroad that follows the canal, if they thought this was a viable alternative they would expand it. I think they realize the labor cost on both ends would make this prohibitive + the time to unload and load up another ship would cause major bottlenecks.

The problem for Panama is that the cost of rail transport is dominated by the time for loading and unloading; once you've gotten to the point that loading/unloading on trains makes sense, suddenly many more countries in that area are competitive; if I recall correctly Mexico is building a rail line across their narrowest part.

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