660 miles according to Bing. With a stop in Medellin, no doubt, to pay special taxes and/or pick up special cargo.
Doesn't look very promising.
Posted on 02/14/2011 11:26:43 AM PST by Oakeshott
Colombia has announced it is negotiating with China to build an alternative to the Panama Canal.
The proposed transport route is intended to promote the flow of goods between Asia and Latin America.
The plan is to create a "dry canal" where the Pacific port of Buenaventura would be linked by rail, across Colombia, to the Atlantic Coast.
Trade between Colombia and China has increased from $10m in 1980 to more than $5bn last year.
The announcement came from the Colombian president, Juan Manuel Santos, who told the Financial Times that the project was "a real proposal... and it is quite advanced".
China has been increasing its involvement across Latin America to feed a growing need for raw materials and commodities.
(Excerpt) Read more at bbc.co.uk ...
Another source of income (investment?) for FARC!
The Chinese look for barter
From Chavez their commie partner
But Confucius say
Hugo won’t pay
And you already got canal from Carter.
-PJ
The implications of this management deal should be obvious. In case of war, it will greatly hamper the ability of the US Navy to get ships from one ocean to another quickly.
Couple this with the fact that China now has a military base on the US mainland. A couple of years ago, the Clinton administration sold the Long Beach Naval Air Station to the China Overseas Shipping Company (COSCO). COSCO is using the facility as a port, but anybody who thinks that the Chinese military isn't ready to make the fullest possible use of the base at a moment's notice is living in a fantasy world.End snip
So now the 'Independent' closet leftist Santos is ready to hand Colombia to China on a silver platter. Precious.
The implications of this management deal should be obvious. In case of war, it will greatly hamper the ability of the US Navy to get ships from one ocean to another quickly.
Couple this with the fact that China now has a military base on the US mainland. A couple of years ago, the Clinton administration sold the Long Beach Naval Air Station to the China Overseas Shipping Company (COSCO). COSCO is using the facility as a port, but anybody who thinks that the Chinese military isn't ready to make the fullest possible use of the base at a moment's notice is living in a fantasy world.End snip
So now the 'Independent' closet leftist Santos is ready to hand Colombia over to China on a silver platter. Precious.
That sounds like a matter of ship design..... It should be possible to create a design that minimizes the ship-to-train transition.
And the ships could be made much bigger, too, because they need not be designed to fit through the locks of the Panama Canal.
Perhaps there is no outcome.
We now have a container port in Mexico that ships containers up through Texas to points mid and east.
The port supplements expensive (union) and overburdened Southern California ports.
There will be surge areas ~ they are called marshalling yards ~ been in use since YEAR 0 in the railroad calendrics!
One more thought. We have had such an arrangement for a long time. Rather than a canal it is called a land bridge.
660 miles according to Bing. With a stop in Medellin, no doubt, to pay special taxes and/or pick up special cargo.
Doesn't look very promising.
We build BIG SHIPS.
We are also a very wealthy nation so we have a multi-basin fleet (there being only one ocean on the planet).
We keep ships off China, in the Middle East, in the Mediterranean, somewhere else, and even somewhere else again ~ whole huge bunches of them AND THEN there's the nuclear fleet ~ it'll get you if nothing else does.
In case of serious trouble we fly bombers out of Missouri to any point on Earth.
Maybe, the Chinese will help Colombia fight their Communist Terrorism problem.
There’s another route for a canal in the area between Colombia and Panama.The Choco River although only a couple of hundred miles long is one of the most voluminous rivers in the world. But that project faces the same problem as the Pan American road in the Darien area there’s really no ‘there’ there.
The big trans-Pacific container ships save lots of time on shipments to Atlantic ocean ports and and containers headed to various North or South American or even European destinations could be loaded on to different ships at the terminus port.
I don't know a lot about international logistics, but on the surface, this makes a lot of sense to me.
-PJ
Now that would be cool to see. Expensive and limited, but hey, it's only money.
They build water bridges, why not tunnels?
When all is said and done it would be cheaper for the Chicoms to dig a new canal. I’ve been on Colombian roads and they are not the best, nor safe.
I am very familiar with marshalling yards, Houston have some of the largest around and that is one reason why I don’t think this is going to work. It requires a spectacular investment in land and infrastructure. The cranes a really expensive.
If it would create an additional delay in shipping, it would not work as the trip from Columbia to the other side of equal latitude, IIRC. is about 9 or 10 days. Tankers cost about 20,000 per day, all costs considered, so it would be a real judgement call.
I just think that a trans-shipment facility that is 30 or so miles from another would simply not work.
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