Posted on 09/07/2017 6:09:08 PM PDT by SMGFan
I believe that ship is made out of Legos.
And the reason why they widened the Panama Canal.
...CGM, the ship made its way to New Jersey after navigating the new Panama Canal locks Aug. 22 and becoming the largest capacity ship to do so.
The whole industry is facing a big problem with these massive ships. There is so much capacity in the industry that they have a hard time making money on this container traffic. A number of companies have cancelled orders for their next generation of container vessels.
Looks like they raised the deck on the bridge w/o having to do much on the base structure.
I read earlier today that the ship arrived in the Port of New York today after making the transit through the Panama Canal around August 22nd. I'm not an expert on the shipping business, but everything I've heard about the industry tells me that New York is not really expected to be a prime destination for trans-Panama vessel traffic.
I am not surprised. Over capacity has been a problem in the ocean shipping industry for many many years.
I used to go over both bridges regularly when I lived on Staten Island in the 60’s and 70’s. Had an old Rambler then that hated my late husband and it died in the middle of the Bayonne bridge on him one day. He was mortified....LOL All I could do was laugh when he finally made it home.
The issue is that New York City is so far north and east on the Atlantic seaboard. If you are a shipping line and you want to deliver 10,000 containers from Asia to the Port of New York, sailing through the Panama Canal would take much longer than either of these options:
1. Sail westbound from Asia through the Suez Canal, then through the Mediterranean Sea and across the Atlantic.
2. Sail eastbound from Asia and drop the containers off at the Port of LA/Long Beach, where they'll be loaded onto intermodal trains and carried across the U.S.
One of my earliest memories is from being three years old, standing in the front seat of the car, which was first in line at a grade crossing. A steam locomotive came thundering down the track, bells ringing, whistle blowing and drivers churning. A magnificent sight in 1945.
That’s exactly what they did. It was kind of weird when they cut out the structure to open up to the new deck and we were still driving over the lower deck. They just finished removing the lower deck and are now in the process of wrecking the old approaches.
Thanks for the post. Way more effort than I thought, but good not to do a “Christy” on traffic flow.
Also good that they had no issues during construction like on the I75 Zilwaukee Bridge or the I480 Toledo Bridge.
I’m always impressed by the size of the parts on steam locos, but the construction beam structures on large bridges are moe impressive. CAD/CAM has come a long way.
Those old trains were magnificent.
At our county fair, LA county, there is a section where old trains are parked and you can climb all over them. We'd go in them, sit in the engineer's seat and try to imagine what it was like to drive those old trains that were nothing but power.
Our favorite was this one, we climbed all over it, I have a photo of my son, aged four sitting in the engineer's seat. One of our favorite photos.
It was a beast!
It was hauled out of California and sent off to Wyoming to be re-fitted. We met the (young) guys who were getting her ready to be hauled out - they were extremely excited to be working on her and spoke to my son and husband for over an hour.
I was sorry to see it leave California - the young mechanics told us that most of these old beauties had been torn apart for scrap and there were IIRC, only three or four left.
Thank you Mr. Romney....
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