[dredmorbius]

I'm not an expert in this area, though the efficiencies of canal systems have interested me greatly in recent years. What's interesting to me is that even today, few canal systems seem to have elevation gains of more than a few metres.

Among the greatest lifts I'm aware of are the Erie Canal (no longer commercially operated, though accessible by pleasure craft), which rises 174m (571 ft) above sea level. Canada's Trent-Severn Waterway origionates on Lake Ontario at 74m (243 ft) elevation. The Panama Canal rises only 26m (85 ft) to Lake Gatun. And the Suez Canal operates without locks.

Which makes the 1,200 m gain of Caminada's proposal all the more audacious. And ... perhaps ... impractical.

[jcranmer]

The C&O Canal (built as a competitor to the Erie Canal) has a 184m (605 ft) lift to get to Cumberland, which is where they gave up trying to reach the Ohio River, haven been beaten by their competitor, the B&O Railroad.

Per Wikipedia, their original planned route had another 2700 ft of total elevation change to make the Ohio River, about 4 times what they had already done.

Pennsylvania's answer to the Erie Canal was the Main Line of Public Works, which was a canal with the hard parts replaced with railroads. The Juniata Division alone was as big a lift as the C&O or Erie, and there was another canal of comparable lift to get down into Pittsburgh.

[dredmorbius]

Intermodal is one answer to "solving the hard bits". Stuff everything into a largish box, and move that between lorries, ships, rail, and whatever.

There are limits to this: containers don't handle bulk cargoes (liquids, ores, grain, lumber), large assmemblies (automobiles, wind turbine components), or high-quantity gasses (e.g., LNG). There are some rail-based options for these (specialised cars), and in other cases alternate transport modes are required.

There's also the general problems that railroads are hard for many shippers (that is: entities looking to ship goods) to deal with, transit times are slow, and routing is inflexible.

There was an article a couple of days ago about Japan looking to implement a very long conveyer-belt system (<https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40809276>, <https://newatlas.com/transport/cargo-conveyor-auto-logistics...>), which is exciting if only that it's amongst the very few novel proposals I've seen in the freight world since intermodal / containerised freight became dominant in the 1970s and 80s. I'd be very interested in what a flexible end-to-end routing without major transshipment and switching congestion might look like. I still think steel-wheel-on-steel-rail is hard to beat for overall efficiency, but more dynamic management of trainsets, electrification, and the ability for, say, containers to autonomously achieve last-mile (or last 20-mile) delivery on their own might be game-changers.

In the early age of rail, one of the strongly-complementary transport technologies was horse-based drayage. The train could get your goods to the station, but further delivery within even a small town required a horse and wagon. In large cities such as New York, the situation was far greater. Automobiles and internal-combustion-engine based lorries utterly revolutionised this, and solved what was an increasingly intractable pollution problem of horse manure, urine, and corpses littering streets. ("Mud" is an interesting euphemism to look up, and fashion choices such as calf-high boots become far more understandable.)

It's also struck me that high-speed rail could (and perhaps should) revolutionise high-speed delivery, taking much of the demand off of air cargo especially for regional delivery. Old-school trains had post office cars in which mail was actively sorted en route. It seems that high-speed rail might offer an automated version of same possibly.

[NikkiA]

> There are limits to this: containers don't handle bulk cargoes (liquids, ores, grain, lumber), large assmemblies (automobiles, wind turbine components), or high-quantity gasses (e.g., LNG). There are some rail-based options for these (specialised cars), and in other cases alternate transport modes are required.

But you CAN put liquid and pressure vessels in a intermodal framework.

Here are pictures of many:

https://duckduckgo.com/?q=isotank&t=ffab&atb=v407-1&iax=imag...

[dredmorbius]

You can do it, but ... it probably scales poorly.

The thing about bulk cargoes is that they are bulk. A total of one third of all commercial ships are bulk liquid petroleum carriers, and those ships devote all their storage capacity to one cargo: crude oil (or in some cases, refined hydrocarbons).

Similarly dry bulk carriers (ore, woodchips, fertilizer, grain), which are shipload cargoes.

Liquified natural gas is also typically shipped in dedicated vessels.

There are some instances where a smaller cargo allotment might be made, but those are almost always on very minor shipping routes.

A key concept in cargo is to use the largest and most standardised box size possible. Hence the standard 40 foot shipping container (the term TFU, or twenty-foot equivalent unit, is actually one half the size ultimately dominating the industry). In the case of bulk cargoes, a shipping container is still too small for most routes.

So: yes, what you describe exists, but it's a very minor element of total cargo movements.

[foota]

My guess is that this is more about practicality than anything. There's hardly a need for such high elevation locks I think, and where there is, tunneling is better.

[dredmorbius]

Or freight modalities which can handle grades intrinsically: rail, trucks, tramways, conveyor belts, sluices (for bulk goods).

I'm trying to think of regions where water-based high elevation gain might be at least within contemplation.

[dmurray]

Inland water-based transport has fallen out of favour these days, not because there's anything wrong with it but because road and rail have got so much better in the last 150 years.

If canal technology had improved at the same rate and we had a magical economic way of building canals over huge mountains, like the one described in the article, of course we'd contemplate building more of them. Connect Denver to San Francisco, connect the Amazon to the Pacific via La Paz, connect Buenos Aires to Santiago, connect the Brahmaputra to the Pearl River over the Himalayas, connect Nagoya to the Sea of Japan via Kyoto.

[dredmorbius]

I'm going to agree with others questioning your declaration of the death of water. River and canal traffic remains huge in numerous regions. The US, western Europe, Russia, and China all have immense canal-and-river systems, and move tremendous amounts of cargo by water, internally (that is, exclusive of ocean freight). And the connectivity is impressive.

New Orleans connects directly to Minneapolis, Chicago, much of the Ohio River Valley, I think to or near Omaha, up the Red River along the Texas-Oklahoma state line, and via the St. Lawrence Seaway to Toronto, Montreal, and ultimately the North Atlantic.

Central Europe has river transit from the North Sea (Hamburg, Amsterdam) to the Black and Baltic. Russia similarly has water routes from the Baltic to the Black Sea.

Much of the problem with routes such as SF <-> Denver is lack of water. The Great Basin is dry. The watershed for Los Angeles extends east 1,500 miles, to Denver, via the Colorado River, which is bled dry before it reaches the sea.

Further north, the Columbia-Missouri rivers nearly meet, and the dream of Louis & Clark could possibly come to be. Rail just happens to be far more practical.

[lucumo]

> Inland water-based transport has fallen out of favour these days,

Where?

It's definitely not out of favour here. We are a water nation, but inland shipping for cross-border transport is at the same level as road transport, and an order of magnitude more than rail transport. https://opendata.cbs.nl/#/CBS/en/dataset/83101ENG/table

We've got the Rhine, but that's hardly the only navigable big river in the world. One of those has much more carrying capacity than a railway and a lower cost.

[simfree]

Water transport of goods is still a thriving business. Crops from farmers in the Columbia River Basin (Oregon, Washington, Idaho) get loaded as far inland as Coeur d'Alene, Idaho.

Dealing with BNSF and Union Pacific Railways is much more costly and complicated for your freight than getting a barge to transport it out to the Pacific Ocean.

This is also why the farmers here are so opposed to dam removal. There are lots of small silted up hydroelectric dams that serve no other purpose today besides making the upstream waterway navigable by boat, which you need if your trying to dodge the high price of trucking or train transport of your crop.

[_visgean]

It is still somehow alive in Germany https://bmdv.bund.de/SharedDocs/EN/Articles/WS/waterways-as-...

> Up to 240 million tonnes of bulk goods are transported per year via the German Federal waterways, which amounts to around 65 billion tonne-kilometres. This equals almost 75 per cent of the goods transport by railway in this country or about 14 million lorry journeys.

[brnt]

In the Netherlands it's even more. Seems like the Dutch wikipage on the subject is far more comprehensive to the English one: https://nl.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Binnenvaart

Says over a quarter of freight goes by boot. Not surprising, seeing as how many small inland ports there are.

[jb69]

You have Canal du midi:189meter (max height) and 249m (ascending elevation) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canal_du_Midi

[Joe8Bit]

As far as I remember the South Penine Ring[0] in Northern England has a max elevation of ~200m/~650ft.

0: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/South_Pennine_Ring

[cproctor]

I paddled through the Erie Canal's locks in Lockport (where I live) last weekend! A lot of history passed through here.