From all the news and such I've seen about this is missing the longer-term impact of the system. Yes, in the near-term it will take up the needed capacity that the Panama canal cannot meet currently due to bottlenecks and price increases, but I believe the longer term is to exploit NAFTA/USMCA by building a manufacturing sector in Oaxaca and Veracruz that uses imported high-technology parts and builds the items there for export to US.
It's already a tried system in Baja California: import the LED/LCD panels from China, assemble in Mex, export to US.
The issue being that Mexico for a country with massive coastlines only has a handful of good deep water ports, especially on the west coast with Lazaro Cardenas, the busiest port in all of Mexico [1], only takes as much tonnage as Port of St. Louis, the 21st US busiest port [2].
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_seaports_in_Mexico
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_ports_in_the_United_St...
Discussion (75 points, 6 months ago, 119 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40115751
And further discussion (110 points, 8 months ago, 107 comments)
Some people are missing the point. If the containers arrive on a giant ship from Asia, then all of the containers contain goods made in Asia. If the containers arrive on a train from Mexico, then some of those containers could contain goods made in Mexico, and the percentage could grow over time.
I don't see it being too useful for cheap bulk goods, but time sensitive, and or pricey goods might take the route?
Yeahhhhh. Also, once you get your cargo to the other side of the isthmus do you have to find another boat to put your stuff back on?
Perhaps they need larger trains, for example a 3x3 container cross-section to increase the capacity of the train line.
I would think this is mainly limited by loading and unloading. Trains are faster than ships so the same cross-section can carry more. It's cheaper to just build more tracks to increase capacity so you don't need custom trains.
Freight trains aren't much faster than merchant ships. On long routes the average speed ends up being about the same. Trains have higher top speed but are also subject to more delays.
A wider train sounds like it would be a lot harder to build in rough terrain, since it needs a wider flat spot and probably a wider turning radius.
I suspect building 3x or even 9x standard width trains would be easier.
recently,somewhere,was detailed the history of exactly how we ended up with "standard" rail guages and that boiled down to ancient choices,that then got litteraly,stuck in a rut ie: the grooves worn into paved surfaces so any real challenge to water born cargo,will need a re-think
It turns out that, like biological evolution, evolution of machinery is the survival of the "good enough". it's probable that the best gauge for railroads, starting from scratch in 2024, would be wider than current standard gauge, but not by a lot; definitely less than 2x wider. the advantage of interoperability is so large that standard gauge will continue to win for a very long time.
There are many advantages to water transport over rail, where water transport is possible. water transport is vastly more efficient. The gauge isn't the reason for that, though; the efficiency is in the same order of magnitude regardless of gauge. Water transport is about one order of magnitude more efficient per mile, iirc. Trains are usually faster and more direct, which is their niche.
Paywalled.