Section 4 of 4 · 3 pages
The water ran out before the shipyards did
Ships grew because the economics of containerisation reward scale relentlessly. What stopped them growing was not steel: it was lock chambers, channel depth and the width of two canals.
Ship’s gear rather than shore gear. A vessel carrying its own cranes can work a berth that has none.
Photo: Container Ship · Wikimedia Commons
The 3 pages in this section
- Panama's 2016 locks, and the ships that no longer fitThe expansion redefined the size classes, and the ships built for the old locks became a category of their own.
- Suez, and the depth that decides everythingCanal draught limits do more to shape ship design than any shipyard's ambition.
- The water ran out before the shipyards didShips passed twenty thousand TEU and the constraint moved to berths, cranes and channel depth rather than to construction.
The other three sections