Our car did not go through the Panama Canal. The fee for a container ship to transit the canal is hundreds of thousands of dollars, and as that cost gets passed on to the customer you try to avoid sending your car through the canal. Our car did take us to see and then later across the canal.
The canal runs in one direction at a time: in the morning, ships leave the Pacific side and transit through to Atlantic, and then in the afternoons ships travel the other way. The Miraflores locks are at the Pacific end, so usually ships arrive there to go up to the Atlantic around three or so.
When we arrived, the kids wanted to see an IMAX movie about the canal. I was probably not the target audience, but the kids probably learned more from the movie than they would have from me droning on about it.
After film, we went up to the viewing platforms next to the lower and middle locks. There are two lanes of locks in the old canal, with a third, newer, bigger lane that is a bit farther on. When we arrived, there were two tankers moving, one in each lane, with a third entering after about 30 minutes.
The canals will accept ships that are almost as wide as the lanes: when we were watching the ships move past there couldn’t have been more than a few feet between shop and canal. To keep the ships aligned, they guide them with electric locomotives attached to lines that go to the ship. There seem to be windlasses on the locos to keep tension in the lines or let slack out as needed. There are 6-8 locomotives that guide each ship (3-4 on a side), and I’m impressed that it works so well. It would seem at first glance that it would be pretty easy to keep tension on the line with each loco just pulling as it can, but the ship is 10^5 tons and the loco is 10^1 tons. If the ship starts to move it would be hard to arrest the motion. I think that the absence of cross-currents probably helps: there just isn’t a force to start the ship moving sideways. Anyway, pretty neat system.
As I mentioned, the ships that travel northward go through in the morning, so in the evenings and afternoons we could see a fleet of container ships from our hotel, waiting to go through the next morning.
Despite all the books and youtube videos about the canal that I’ve consumed over the years, it was neat to see it in person. The shear hubris of making a canal through the isthmus is impressive, and to think that it was done more than a century ago is even more impressive.
3 Responses
The Panama Canal is intriguing. When I saw your earlier pictures I wondered how those locomotives stayed on the inclined track. Are they cogged? The ratio of locomotive to ship weight was interesting. I didn’t realize that the locomotives weight even approached the ship’s weight. When I first learned about the Panama Canal in grade school it was only 40 years since final completion. So much seems to have changed. I really enjoy your comments.
The ships are 10,000 times or so the weight of the locomotives. The carat didn’t show up in the text, but it should have been locos 10 to the first power tons, ships 10 to the fifth power tons. I’ve been thinking about it, and I I guess what I didn’t see is how they bring the ships in. As long as there is no lateral motion coming into the locks, then nothing should create it. The ships do approach the locks very slowly.
I learned about the Panama Canal back in the 1960’s, and was fascinated by it’s construction many years earlier. The sheer manpower was impressive, and the fact they faced oppressive heat and yellow fever and still got the job done in a timely fashion still boggles my mind. It’s a testament to what man can do when they really need something! Thanks for showing us (literally) many of the moving parts we were not aware of –