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.
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.
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.
I'm trying to think of regions where water-based high elevation gain might be at least within contemplation.
Given a sufficient source of water above the highest tunnel, this seems like a remarkably efficient system, if almost certainly not economically viable to construct or maintain.
If we simplify a bit and assume that all tunnels are of the same size, with the volume of water needed to fill one tunnel plus the net displacement of the freight going up versus down, every barge in every tunnel is moved one tunnel forward on each slope, going up or down one side of the system. It’s interesting because there is automatic energy recovery “regenerative braking” because the displacement of the descending freight reduces the water consumption in proportion to the amount used to raise an equal amount of ascending freight. Pretty cool.
It would probably be more cost effective to use that same water source to build a hydroelectric powered electric locomotive, but -theoretically- the canal system should be able to move more freight.
In practice, i would bet on the railway, especially if descending trains fed energy back into the system to help power ascending ones. As for economics of construction and maintenance, the train would probably be orders of magnitude more cost effective.
Nonetheless, an elegant idea with an idyllic implementation. Kind of has a “clever” code smell though lol.
I keep looking at this and coming back to this point. Where on earth can you get that volume of water that high up reliably year round?
Not that that this looks practical - the tunnels would be huge, just for starters.
That was built in 1803. The project in the article was proposed in 1907, which was way late to be getting into narrowboat canals. Railroads, both ordinary and cogwheel, were working just fine in Swizerland by then.
For the sake of the narrative?
There are a couple of canal systems:
That particular project may have turned not to be economically viable, but it was at the very least thought of and studied seriously.
That kind of burning flame has now died miserably, and all Europe is now capable of doing is keeping the lights on.
https://www.euronews.com/next/2023/09/16/the-high-speed-rail...
Proposals for bridging the Straits of Gibraltar, Norway's E39 project, the EU project as a whole, and Energiewende (and its various national counterparts) would also strike me as major forward-thinking endeavours.
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Notes:
1. My focus is on technical rather than economic success here, though each project mentioned here did go operational, and all but Concorde remain so. Economic viability is a challenge for most megaprojects.
And thus would easily be matched or topped in capacity by anything rolling trough the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gotthard_Base_Tunnel , faster.
