Plus the time to unload and load all those containers (3-4days). I don't see rail competing with the canal.
Edit: On average there are 7.5 container ships transiting the Panama canal per day. And it takes 8-10 hours to transit ocean-to-ocean.
If you can get dozens of trains from coast to coast in the time it takes to get one caego ship through the canal, that could end up being significantly more economical - and maybe even faster - in the long run.
Not really, no.
It takes 3 to 4 days to unload 1 ship, and we can assume it takes about the same time to reload them on the other side. Let's be generous, and assume that we can put the entire load on one train, that has an average speed of 40 km/h. That will be an other 8 hours gone to get from harbor A to harbor B. So, for one ship, you went from a 10 hour crossing, to 8+ days of loading-train-travel-unloading.
Now for the logistics part. If one ship holds 15,000 containers, and a train carries 400 containers, you need 38 trains to transfer 1 ship worth of containers.
In 2022, 19 ships a day passed through the Panama canal, per direction. So you would need 722 trains to process the same capacity.
You have 1440 minutes in a day, so to absorb the the incoming freight, you will need a train every 2 minutes on a single track, 24 hours a day. Which, is completely unrealistic. You can double the track, and now you have a 4 minute slot in between trains, per track. Still completely unrealistic. If you would have 5 tracks per direction, you can get to a 10 minute slot in between trains, 24 hours a day, which is still not realistic.
So, in conclusion, we can say that the rail solution does not scale better.
10 min slot is starting to be realistic. But the unloading/reloading is still not realistic. At least, not with current trains and loading cranes. If you could make special purpose rail and cars which hold 4 containers per car (2 side by side, stacked 2 high), you get 4x capacity, now only 2 tracks per direction is enough. Special cranes which could sit above whole ship and unload several containers at once would speed unloading.
Such engineering challenge would probably cost as much as original canal, but would not require so much water (water is main bottleneck currently).
It sounds impractical, but so does marshaling all the trucks and trains to get the very same containers from the original shippers to the ports of origin and from the ports of destination to the final recipients.
Could be done, I guess. The high-speed tracks in Europe are protected with fences, and have no level crossings, so the same could be done here to have a fully-automatic motorized wagon system. Without locomotive you would need a third-rail electricity pick-up system. Less safe, but the track is fenced off, so why not?
Sure, you could scale it and build 10 train tracks side-by-side (whoa!) which would support 5 trains in each direction, and then you'd only need to get 8 trains faster in total.
And that's disregarding the 3-4 days needed on either end to unload/load the ships.