When your ship can damn near be seen from space with the naked eye, maybe it’s too big…

The quest for more payload and with it low operating costs is eternal- No doubt a few millennia ago someone built a really big canoe or row boat that required a double digit sized number of paddlers, only to fail to deliver or worse when most of the paddlers were disabled by drunkenness or worse. Then came the railroads…

Union Pacific “Big Boy”, Northern Pacific’s “Yellowstone” may have been a couple tons heavier
Then in the 50s UP tried “Bunker” oil fueled turbines. When that didn’t work, they stoked it with coal…
UP twin engine “Centennial” from the late 60s
6000 horsepower UP EMD SD90MAC from the 90s, Canadian Pacific suckered for a few of these lemons too

Union Pacific is a brute force kinda railroad- When their tracks across Great Salt Lake were sinking a couple decades ago, they just dumped two trainloads a day of ballast there until the tracks quit sinking. So no surprise that UP has been the major offender in pushing the practical limits of how big a locomotive is “too big”. While the “Big Boys” hauled plenty of freight for UP, they were so heavy that most other railroads tracks couldn’t handle them. Then along come the “little” diesel locomotives and you just couple 2 or 3 together, hook up the control cables, and you’ve got as much or more power than a “Big Boy” with a lot less expensive drama. UP’s megalomaniacs weren’t about to settle for that, so they tried 8000+ horsepower gas turbines later fueled with coal, the “Centennial” with two Diesel engines in one locomotive, and finally EMD’s ill fated 6000 horsepower SD90MACs in the 90s. All of the above since the “Big Boy” were failures, even the SD90MAC had no advantage over the “normal” 4400 horsepower locomotives because it had the same six axles to put power to rail and a newbie lemon of an engine to boot. UP is still pushing the limits, trying to run 3 mile long trains on tracks where the longest siding is 2 miles long. Worse yet, many of the other railroads are following UP’s lead.

17 axle South Dakota doubles, legal for about twice the 80,000 pound weight limit of most states…

Of course, some of the truckers too are feeling out just where the point of diminishing returns is… That’s an efficient rig for hauling from pit to plant, but good luck making a U-turn on even a wide road or getting through a muddy site with barely 20% of the weight on the drive wheels…

But ships don’t have to fit into standard 12 foot wide lanes or keep their back trailers back wheels out of the grass on freeway interchange loops. Despite UP’s challenges, the practical length of a train is limited by siding length and it’s weight by the strength of the couplers to around 7500 feet and 20,000 tons. Here in Minnesota barge tows on the Mississippi and “Lakers” on the Saint Lawrence Seaway are limited by the size of the locks they have to fit through, but none the less a barge tow can swallow a couple unit trains of grain and a “Laker” four or more, for some pretty impressive productivity. But the big container shipping lines weren’t satisfied…

And they’re building bigger ones yet…

Let me put the scale of this ship in perspective- It can carry over 20,000 TEUs, which is shorthand for “Twenty foot Equivalent Unit”, though the 40 foot long containers are now more common, and it can carry 10,000+ of them. Being a quarter mile long more than one granary crane can load/unload it at a time, but that’s still 10,000 lifts and 10,000 moves to be made, and then the same number again to reload. Probably the busiest railroad intermodal traffic lane is Southern California ports to Chicagoland, and about 25 intermodal trains travel that route every day carrying about 200 40 foot containers apiece… And it would take two days for those 25 trains to haul this ships load away! It gets worse- about half the containers coming into the SoCal ports get trucked out, that’s 5000 trailers and chassis to get hooked up, pre-tripped, and out the port’s gates, and the same number of containers and chassis returning a few days later.

A new ship like this costs about $100 million, but that’s only about $10,000 for each 40 foot container hauled, an intermodal unit train and locomotives cost around 10 times as much and a truck 15 times as much per container capacity… So there’s nothing holding back the growing size of these ships, and thus not a whole lot of motivation for the shipping companies to draw a line at “too big” and buy nothing bigger. For the ports and canals that have to deal with these floating behemoths, the costs are much larger- Multi-million dollar gantry cranes have to be replaced with even bigger and more expensive new gantry cranes, harbors have to be dredged, and in New York harbor the taxpayers paid over a billion dollars to raise a bridge so these behemoths could fit. The Panama Canal just spent $5 billion to put in a new set of bigger locks, and this behemoth of a ship is too big to fit… But the Canal is being pressured to spend $17 billion plus cost overruns for a new even bigger set of locks, which will be obsoleted the day they open by even bigger ships. And The Suez Canal, where the above behemoth’s twin is now stuck and plugging up much of the world’s commerce? They just spent $9 billion to widen their canal, and it still wasn’t wide enough!

I think the container shipping industry has found what “too big” is, now the world’s governments need to unite and firmly tell them their behemoth ships can’t grow any bigger.