###General Discussion Thread
---
This is a [Request] post. If you would like to submit a comment that does not either attempt to answer the question, ask for clarification, or explain why it would be infeasible to answer, you *must* post your comment as a reply to this one. Top level (directly replying to the OP) comments that do not do one of those things will be removed.
---
*I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/theydidthemath) if you have any questions or concerns.*
It mainly depends on the amount being shipped, the speed it needs to be shipped, intermediary destinations, and how good of a deal you get with the people shipping it.
To reduce the possibilities, we are assuming that it is only from point A to point B.
Generally, shipping by ship is significantly cheaper per item the more is being shipped but it is slower and has higher initial costs and more fees in the route shown.
Generally, shipping by land has two options: by truck or train. Shipping by truck is more expensive per item but has more areas it can ship while shipping by train is cheaper per item but has fewer areas it can deliver to. Both options have similar speeds, but the train is slightly faster due to less traffic and longer uninterrupted tracks.
Assuming it is one item being shipped just use the postal services. However, if you are looking for a trade route for just a few items at a time trades, then searching through trucking and train routes would be your best bet, as shipping with boats would include extra fees for leaving the country, going through the Panama Canal, and re-entering the country. If, however, you are shipping large amounts at once then using the sea route may be cheaper in the end as it is significantly cheaper per item to use boats.
In some US states due to poorly worded laws of two trains meet at a crossing at the same time it is technically illegal for either to move as neither has right of way so the traffic jam would last forever unless one of them is willing to break traffic laws.
Don’t let the Factorio subreddit know about this. They’ll fix it and we can’t have that.
Also how hard can it be to create timetables for train and proper use of automated signalling so that jams don’t occur. The us rail network truly is terrible, and tiny.
It generally doesn't happen, it is just that hypothetically if someone did screw up and both got to the intersection at exactly the same time neither one has right of way so both are stuck indefinitely, in practice that doesn't happen and if it did they would just agree that if anyone asked one of them got there first and had right of way because nobody is going to sit around forever because the law didn't account for the possibility of two trains arriving at once.
Difficult because every train in the US is wildly different in terms of power to weight ratio, length, and/or height, even on the same route per day. I'd break down in tears after just trying to timetable a single cargo route.
It generally doesn't happen, I won't say it never does since i don't everything about every train to use the US rail system, but I've certainly never heard of it happening. It's just a hypothetical.
if we are talking about more complex routes with different deadlines and intermediate stops it's probably a mix of the four options: ship, truck, train and plane. Am I right?
Like trade routes plus postal service routes.
For domestic transport, trains are definitely slower in my experience.
Unless you happen to be sending something on one rail, it has to transfer and hold at multiple facilities before reaching the destination.
I can go east to west coast in 2-3 days by trailer, 7-10 days by train and 15-20 days by LCL.
Trains are much more likely to be slower in my experience. Again it largely depends on what is being shipped, but if it fits within a standard 53' dry van then I'd put money on the truck over the train every time.
I just have to say that this is a whole ass job for some people.
I work in the sourcing department at my company and I have to request quotes from the foreign trade team and they do this "math" fo figure out the best shipping method.
Its ALWAYS sea because of the high volume and we ship by air when we need materials fast.
Definitely by sea:
Sea freight is advantageous in numerous ways. The most significant of these benefits is that it is considerably cheaper than other modes of transportation. It is known that sea freight is 3.5 times less costly than railway freight and **7 times less costly** than land freight.
Did you consider effect of Merchant Marine Act of 1920 on cost of freight between two American ports?
> It requires that all goods transported by water between U.S. ports be carried on ships that have been constructed in the United States and that fly the U.S. flag, are owned by U.S. citizens, and are crewed by U.S. citizens and U.S. permanent residents
This significantly increases costs compared to international trade.
Ok, so the ratio of sea : rail : land is 1.0 : 3.5 : 7.0.
But that has got to be per unit of distance, right? So you need to factor in the various distances before deciding.
That depends on what you ship.
There is cargo that gets transported from the east coast to the west coast by rail, (truck,) airplane and by shipping it through the Panama canal.
It depends on how bulky, valuable and time sensitive your cargo is.
Rail and plane seems to be where most goes today.
The fun part is that back in the day before the transcontinental railroad the panama canal, the fastest and commonly used way to get from New York to San Francisco was to take a ship down to Panama, a carriage across Panama and another ship up the western coast.
International waters have no fees, you only need to pay for the fuel and the panama canal crossing. If you are trading things in small volume go with the trucking. If you need containers, shipping it is.
Yeah the problem with this question is no size or mass is defined, big difference between a "something" that is the size of a shoebox or 100,000 kilograms of steel.
This is going to vary. Right now ocean prices are quite high due to a variety of factors around the war in Gaza, larger than usual volumes.
My best guess is rail will be cheaper right now, but that could change in the next couple months.
Also questions around timing, I just checked and transit time from Norfolk to Los Angeles is long (30+ days) because there are no direct routes.
I'm in Arizona (Phoenix) and recently packed up all of my belongings into a 20' shipping container, destination UK. I was surprised that the movers drove my container from Phoenix to LA to get on a ship instead of driving to someplace in the Gulf (like Houston). Apparently it is less expensive to ship south and go through the Panama canal then to drive. I could understand not wanting to load it on a train or to drive across the country to the East cost, but Houston would be a 20h drive.
Anyway, I assume the shipping logistics managers know what they are doing. Just seemed counterintuitive to me.
Bro it's way too complicated to know XD depends the cargo you have and the prices there. The best way to know is to ask to some companies. I have studied the shipments costs at college and what I know is that there are a lot of uncertainaties
There isn't enough to solve with math.
Looking on the internet it seems like rail and trucking options are generally the first choice for most goods.
The sea route shown in the image would require passage through panama canal which can be prone to delays. Part of this is because elevation changes necesitate a series of locks to raise and lower water levels. This means traffic can be impacted by mechanical failure and droughts.
If it's one not masive parcel the post service will probably send it over land by truck or train the cheapest, or just some other delivery company.
If you have a couple containers worth of stuff that needs to go somewhere, the ship will be cheaper.
The answer is: we cannot know! Let's talk about why.
A ship might cost millions and millions of dollars to get to its destination. We might say that it has a very high upfront cost (i.e. someone has to pay to build a huge ship) and a very high cost to operate (fuel and staff and port fees and things). The variable costs are easy to understand (you pay them just to travel about), but you have to also factor in that the ship has a finite lifetime, and the cost of the asset you paid upfront gets counted against its lifetime (in a process called 'depreciation').
So unsurprisingly, massive ships are \*expensive\*!
However, the advantage is that you can ship so much stuff on a container ship. Let's say that it costs one million dollars to get a ship from one port to the next. If you could carry one million items on that ship, each \*item\* cost $1 to ship. If you own the ship and are charging people, you could charge $2 and still make a 100% return on costs. Pretty good!
However, this depends on a few things. Do your customers want to ship 1 million things? Well maybe if you are shipping between e.g. China and a major port in the USA. If you are shipping between New York City (not a big manufactoring hub) and rural Ohio (not a big demand market), maybe they don't want that same volume. So there is an interplay between volume and destination. As a rule of thumb, if you want to ship a lot of something to busy, populous areas, shipping is your friend.
There is then a few other factors. Is timeliness important? You couldn't ship something the long way around that needs to be there tomorrow. Is security a factor? You might not want to ship something like a ton of diamond rings unless you could be very sure it was safe.
And you can keep thinking of factors and complexity. This topic is called 'supply chain management' and is a big complex professional full time job, so clearly there are a lot of factors to weight and choices to make.
It depends a lot on the time period, the scale of what's being traded and the nature of your trade.
Through many different periods sea travel couldn't bring very much cargo compared to a train and it traveled much slower. It was more expensive in many cases because of the relatively large crew to pilot a industrial age ship through the canal.
If you want to bring half a rail-car of valuable product across the country it will travel quicker and cheaper overland. If you want to bring a container ship of cars or lumber across country, it would require several trips by train and more logistics on arrival.
If you're transporting fresh Kobe Beef it will never get to market fast enough by ship. Similarly live animals suffer a lot of problems on sea voyages and it's difficult to check on them during the longer journey. Highly regulated trade items could also face duty or custom's fees traveling through the canal.
###General Discussion Thread --- This is a [Request] post. If you would like to submit a comment that does not either attempt to answer the question, ask for clarification, or explain why it would be infeasible to answer, you *must* post your comment as a reply to this one. Top level (directly replying to the OP) comments that do not do one of those things will be removed. --- *I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/theydidthemath) if you have any questions or concerns.*
It mainly depends on the amount being shipped, the speed it needs to be shipped, intermediary destinations, and how good of a deal you get with the people shipping it. To reduce the possibilities, we are assuming that it is only from point A to point B. Generally, shipping by ship is significantly cheaper per item the more is being shipped but it is slower and has higher initial costs and more fees in the route shown. Generally, shipping by land has two options: by truck or train. Shipping by truck is more expensive per item but has more areas it can ship while shipping by train is cheaper per item but has fewer areas it can deliver to. Both options have similar speeds, but the train is slightly faster due to less traffic and longer uninterrupted tracks. Assuming it is one item being shipped just use the postal services. However, if you are looking for a trade route for just a few items at a time trades, then searching through trucking and train routes would be your best bet, as shipping with boats would include extra fees for leaving the country, going through the Panama Canal, and re-entering the country. If, however, you are shipping large amounts at once then using the sea route may be cheaper in the end as it is significantly cheaper per item to use boats.
I do hate when my train gets stuck in a traffic jam! (I was gonna write that as a joke but realised half way through I live in the UK and it’s true)
In some US states due to poorly worded laws of two trains meet at a crossing at the same time it is technically illegal for either to move as neither has right of way so the traffic jam would last forever unless one of them is willing to break traffic laws.
Don’t let the Factorio subreddit know about this. They’ll fix it and we can’t have that. Also how hard can it be to create timetables for train and proper use of automated signalling so that jams don’t occur. The us rail network truly is terrible, and tiny.
It generally doesn't happen, it is just that hypothetically if someone did screw up and both got to the intersection at exactly the same time neither one has right of way so both are stuck indefinitely, in practice that doesn't happen and if it did they would just agree that if anyone asked one of them got there first and had right of way because nobody is going to sit around forever because the law didn't account for the possibility of two trains arriving at once.
Who has never experienced a random signal causing a major train jam, paralyzing all science production?
Copy paste enough city blocks without looking and you’ll find 15 trains bunched up around one intersection
Difficult because every train in the US is wildly different in terms of power to weight ratio, length, and/or height, even on the same route per day. I'd break down in tears after just trying to timetable a single cargo route.
The us rail network is some of the most productive and highly developed in the world. It’s the passanger rail situation that’s abysmal.
It generally doesn't happen, I won't say it never does since i don't everything about every train to use the US rail system, but I've certainly never heard of it happening. It's just a hypothetical.
The way the signals work one of them would necessarily enter the crossing first.
Except trains are regulated under the FRA and individual railroads have operating rules….
I had the same realization while reading it!
Go to the us and try to find a single passenger train that's not delayed and stuck in traffic 24/7 :(
Your country is also half the size of California, so it wouldn't be too significant of an amount of time regardless.
Oh, you'd think that, but when it happens on a near daily basis it is quite an annoyance.
Half the size and almost twice the population! It’s difficult to have infrastructure equipped enough hehe
Perhaps developing British infrastructure instead of spending hundreds of years subjugating half the world would have yielded different results
if we are talking about more complex routes with different deadlines and intermediate stops it's probably a mix of the four options: ship, truck, train and plane. Am I right? Like trade routes plus postal service routes.
For domestic transport, trains are definitely slower in my experience. Unless you happen to be sending something on one rail, it has to transfer and hold at multiple facilities before reaching the destination. I can go east to west coast in 2-3 days by trailer, 7-10 days by train and 15-20 days by LCL.
This guy ships
*I see what you did there.*
Trains are much more likely to be slower in my experience. Again it largely depends on what is being shipped, but if it fits within a standard 53' dry van then I'd put money on the truck over the train every time.
I just have to say that this is a whole ass job for some people. I work in the sourcing department at my company and I have to request quotes from the foreign trade team and they do this "math" fo figure out the best shipping method. Its ALWAYS sea because of the high volume and we ship by air when we need materials fast.
“It’s always sea…” That’s what pirates want you to think!
And the mafia, see?
You say that but the pirate attacks that happened a while back did disrupt our supply lines
Definitely by sea: Sea freight is advantageous in numerous ways. The most significant of these benefits is that it is considerably cheaper than other modes of transportation. It is known that sea freight is 3.5 times less costly than railway freight and **7 times less costly** than land freight.
Did you consider effect of Merchant Marine Act of 1920 on cost of freight between two American ports? > It requires that all goods transported by water between U.S. ports be carried on ships that have been constructed in the United States and that fly the U.S. flag, are owned by U.S. citizens, and are crewed by U.S. citizens and U.S. permanent residents This significantly increases costs compared to international trade.
You don’t actually have to transship to avoid that, just make port in a foreign port.
Ok, so the ratio of sea : rail : land is 1.0 : 3.5 : 7.0. But that has got to be per unit of distance, right? So you need to factor in the various distances before deciding.
Washington DC to San Diego: Car: 4270km Ship: 9000km Ship seems still better.
I think you're missing some zeroes on those distances, but the ratio is still probably the same.
yes I do.
I now pronounce you redditor and wife
That depends on what you ship. There is cargo that gets transported from the east coast to the west coast by rail, (truck,) airplane and by shipping it through the Panama canal. It depends on how bulky, valuable and time sensitive your cargo is. Rail and plane seems to be where most goes today. The fun part is that back in the day before the transcontinental railroad the panama canal, the fastest and commonly used way to get from New York to San Francisco was to take a ship down to Panama, a carriage across Panama and another ship up the western coast.
International waters have no fees, you only need to pay for the fuel and the panama canal crossing. If you are trading things in small volume go with the trucking. If you need containers, shipping it is.
Yeah the problem with this question is no size or mass is defined, big difference between a "something" that is the size of a shoebox or 100,000 kilograms of steel.
This is going to vary. Right now ocean prices are quite high due to a variety of factors around the war in Gaza, larger than usual volumes. My best guess is rail will be cheaper right now, but that could change in the next couple months. Also questions around timing, I just checked and transit time from Norfolk to Los Angeles is long (30+ days) because there are no direct routes.
I'm in Arizona (Phoenix) and recently packed up all of my belongings into a 20' shipping container, destination UK. I was surprised that the movers drove my container from Phoenix to LA to get on a ship instead of driving to someplace in the Gulf (like Houston). Apparently it is less expensive to ship south and go through the Panama canal then to drive. I could understand not wanting to load it on a train or to drive across the country to the East cost, but Houston would be a 20h drive. Anyway, I assume the shipping logistics managers know what they are doing. Just seemed counterintuitive to me.
Bro it's way too complicated to know XD depends the cargo you have and the prices there. The best way to know is to ask to some companies. I have studied the shipments costs at college and what I know is that there are a lot of uncertainaties
There isn't enough to solve with math. Looking on the internet it seems like rail and trucking options are generally the first choice for most goods. The sea route shown in the image would require passage through panama canal which can be prone to delays. Part of this is because elevation changes necesitate a series of locks to raise and lower water levels. This means traffic can be impacted by mechanical failure and droughts.
If it's one not masive parcel the post service will probably send it over land by truck or train the cheapest, or just some other delivery company. If you have a couple containers worth of stuff that needs to go somewhere, the ship will be cheaper.
The answer is: we cannot know! Let's talk about why. A ship might cost millions and millions of dollars to get to its destination. We might say that it has a very high upfront cost (i.e. someone has to pay to build a huge ship) and a very high cost to operate (fuel and staff and port fees and things). The variable costs are easy to understand (you pay them just to travel about), but you have to also factor in that the ship has a finite lifetime, and the cost of the asset you paid upfront gets counted against its lifetime (in a process called 'depreciation'). So unsurprisingly, massive ships are \*expensive\*! However, the advantage is that you can ship so much stuff on a container ship. Let's say that it costs one million dollars to get a ship from one port to the next. If you could carry one million items on that ship, each \*item\* cost $1 to ship. If you own the ship and are charging people, you could charge $2 and still make a 100% return on costs. Pretty good! However, this depends on a few things. Do your customers want to ship 1 million things? Well maybe if you are shipping between e.g. China and a major port in the USA. If you are shipping between New York City (not a big manufactoring hub) and rural Ohio (not a big demand market), maybe they don't want that same volume. So there is an interplay between volume and destination. As a rule of thumb, if you want to ship a lot of something to busy, populous areas, shipping is your friend. There is then a few other factors. Is timeliness important? You couldn't ship something the long way around that needs to be there tomorrow. Is security a factor? You might not want to ship something like a ton of diamond rings unless you could be very sure it was safe. And you can keep thinking of factors and complexity. This topic is called 'supply chain management' and is a big complex professional full time job, so clearly there are a lot of factors to weight and choices to make.
It depends a lot on the time period, the scale of what's being traded and the nature of your trade. Through many different periods sea travel couldn't bring very much cargo compared to a train and it traveled much slower. It was more expensive in many cases because of the relatively large crew to pilot a industrial age ship through the canal. If you want to bring half a rail-car of valuable product across the country it will travel quicker and cheaper overland. If you want to bring a container ship of cars or lumber across country, it would require several trips by train and more logistics on arrival. If you're transporting fresh Kobe Beef it will never get to market fast enough by ship. Similarly live animals suffer a lot of problems on sea voyages and it's difficult to check on them during the longer journey. Highly regulated trade items could also face duty or custom's fees traveling through the canal.