Ever-growing container ships

[orudge]

A rather interesting article on the BBC web site. Just how much bigger are container ships likely to get, considering the largest today can only dock at a handful of places?

If this was TTD, of course, we'd have bulldozed a massive direct railway between Europe and Asia, with giant tunnels through mountains and whatnot. (I appreciate railways do exist between Europe and Asia, but they're not the most efficient means of goods transportation, at least when we're talking about East Asia!)

[JamieLei]

Railways do have a competitive advantage when it comes to speed. They'll never beat sea transport, but it takes months and months to get something across the world by sea, requiring a tremendous amount of planning in advance and the risks that come. The merchandise for Valentines Day would have been dispatched from China in November in order to make it to the US stores in time. You simply have no flexibility if you need to get a product out fast, and railways fill the gap nicely, and can do it in much greater volumes compared to airlines.

[Kevo00]

Or, to put it another way, they would fill more than 30 trains, each a mile long and stacked two containers high.

No train is ever going to compete here! And despite the port capacity problem, ships do have the advantage that they need no track.

I do understand though, that Maersk is slowing down its investment in new ships after the current generation, which were ordered pre-2007.

Also, reshoring seems likely to gradually undercut this trade as the relative cost of it grows.

[APDAF]

but it takes months and months

It takes less than three weeks to go from Shanghai to Rotterdam not months and months.

The merchandise for Valentines Day would have been dispatched from China in November in order to make it to the US stores in time.

That is for the benefit of land transport i.e trucks and vans, and for the stores to have the right amount of stock as it takes time to count such things.