"A statement provided to us Friday from the Panama Canal Authority said that a high level of arrivals during the last in September coincided with schedule dry-chamber maintenance."
You probably know, but for those who don’t: that still is vapourware, but seems borderline feasible both technically and economically, so we may see it built (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nicaragua_Canal).
There's a railroad. It can carry about 1,500 containers a day[1]. There are approximately 175,000 containers waiting to transit the canal, based on the 33,500 figure in the linked Wiki page and the 5 day wait.
Technically Panama's is the first transcontinental railroad, beating the Union Pacific by fourteen years. Panama's was running in 1855 while the line over the Sierra Nevada opened in 1869.
Transfer to truck/rail would also require a lot of seaport facilities which simply haven't been built in the area (it's designed as a canal, after all). You'd have to send the ships up to some container port on the Gulf of Mexico and ship them out via train to Los Angeles or someplace with capacity.
I assume someone is running the numbers for fuel cost and time to just sail around South America, it has to break even or be a better deal at some point.
Explain how you expect that would happen. What specific, reasonably plausible events would have to occur? Remember to take into account the fact that the canal will be adding capacity shortly, with the addition of the new bigger locks.
What I'm trying to get at is that, unless the canal was shut down completely for months at a time, there is no economical situation where it would make sense to round the cape instead of just waiting it out.
Kind of like ebay not considering their 2-hour Sunday "planned maintenance events" to be outages ... for 2 decades.