I'm not an expert in this area, though the efficiencies of canal systems have interested me greatly in recent years. What's interesting to me is that even today, few canal systems seem to have elevation gains of more than a few metres.
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.
The C&O Canal (built as a competitor to the Erie Canal) has a 184m (605 ft) lift to get to Cumberland, which is where they gave up trying to reach the Ohio River, haven been beaten by their competitor, the B&O Railroad.
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.
Intermodal is one answer to "solving the hard bits". Stuff everything into a largish box, and move that between lorries, ships, rail, and whatever.
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.
> 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.
But you CAN put liquid and pressure vessels in a intermodal framework.
The thing about bulk cargoes is that they are bulk. A total of one third of all commercial ships are bulk liquid petroleum carriers, and those ships devote all their storage capacity to one cargo: crude oil (or in some cases, refined hydrocarbons).
Similarly dry bulk carriers (ore, woodchips, fertilizer, grain), which are shipload cargoes.
Liquified natural gas is also typically shipped in dedicated vessels.
There are some instances where a smaller cargo allotment might be made, but those are almost always on very minor shipping routes.
A key concept in cargo is to use the largest and most standardised box size possible. Hence the standard 40 foot shipping container (the term TFU, or twenty-foot equivalent unit, is actually one half the size ultimately dominating the industry). In the case of bulk cargoes, a shipping container is still too small for most routes.
So: yes, what you describe exists, but it's a very minor element of total cargo movements.
My guess is that this is more about practicality than anything. There's hardly a need for such high elevation locks I think, and where there is, tunneling is better.
Inland water-based transport has fallen out of favour these days, not because there's anything wrong with it but because road and rail have got so much better in the last 150 years.
If canal technology had improved at the same rate and we had a magical economic way of building canals over huge mountains, like the one described in the article, of course we'd contemplate building more of them. Connect Denver to San Francisco, connect the Amazon to the Pacific via La Paz, connect Buenos Aires to Santiago, connect the Brahmaputra to the Pearl River over the Himalayas, connect Nagoya to the Sea of Japan via Kyoto.
I'm going to agree with others questioning your declaration of the death of water. River and canal traffic remains huge in numerous regions. The US, western Europe, Russia, and China all have immense canal-and-river systems, and move tremendous amounts of cargo by water, internally (that is, exclusive of ocean freight). And the connectivity is impressive.
New Orleans connects directly to Minneapolis, Chicago, much of the Ohio River Valley, I think to or near Omaha, up the Red River along the Texas-Oklahoma state line, and via the St. Lawrence Seaway to Toronto, Montreal, and ultimately the North Atlantic.
Central Europe has river transit from the North Sea (Hamburg, Amsterdam) to the Black and Baltic. Russia similarly has water routes from the Baltic to the Black Sea.
Much of the problem with routes such as SF <-> Denver is lack of water. The Great Basin is dry. The watershed for Los Angeles extends east 1,500 miles, to Denver, via the Colorado River, which is bled dry before it reaches the sea.
Further north, the Columbia-Missouri rivers nearly meet, and the dream of Louis & Clark could possibly come to be. Rail just happens to be far more practical.
> Inland water-based transport has fallen out of favour these days,
Where?
It's definitely not out of favour here. We are a water nation, but inland shipping for cross-border transport is at the same level as road transport, and an order of magnitude more than rail transport.
https://opendata.cbs.nl/#/CBS/en/dataset/83101ENG/table
We've got the Rhine, but that's hardly the only navigable big river in the world. One of those has much more carrying capacity than a railway and a lower cost.
Water transport of goods is still a thriving business. Crops from farmers in the Columbia River Basin (Oregon, Washington, Idaho) get loaded as far inland as Coeur d'Alene, Idaho.
Dealing with BNSF and Union Pacific Railways is much more costly and complicated for your freight than getting a barge to transport it out to the Pacific Ocean.
This is also why the farmers here are so opposed to dam removal. There are lots of small silted up hydroelectric dams that serve no other purpose today besides making the upstream waterway navigable by boat, which you need if your trying to dodge the high price of trucking or train transport of your crop.
> Up to 240 million tonnes of bulk goods are transported per year via the German Federal waterways, which amounts to around 65 billion tonne-kilometres. This equals almost 75 per cent of the goods transport by railway in this country or about 14 million lorry journeys.
There’s no violation of physics here, simply the energy transfer of potential energy from water moving downhill.
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.
That thing is scary. If a boat on an uphill tunnel doesn't keep moving forward to keep up with the rising water, the boat is forced against the top of the tunnel and everybody drowns.
You can probably put a catenary with wheels on top of your boat and alongside to forward sides to ensure pushing it against the roof pushes your boat forward.
It's for freight, though, and if I understand it correctly, the force of the upward movement is automatically converted to horizontal movement by the pulley/rail system. So there's potentially no need for anyone to be on the boat as it transits the tunnel.
Not that that this looks practical - the tunnels would be huge, just for starters.
Not that huge. This thing seems to have been scaled for narrowboats, like the old British canal system. Those have some tunnels, just barely big enough for the boats.
Here's the longest canal tunnel in the UK.[1]
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.
Is there a demonstration of the locks somewhere? From the patent it sounds like a tunnel that gets flooded which lifts the ship. The tunnel must be really large because it has to fit the ship at an angle and not just head on.
a tunnel is supporting some downward pressure above it while a pip is resisting an outwards pressure from inside - a brick/stone arch might work for downwards pressure, but will just come apart if pushed from the inside - unlike the illustration they'd more likely need some reinforced concrete structure to support the weight of the water/boat
Also: Concorde. The Chunnel. The Gothard Base Tunnel. The Øresund Bridge/Tunnel. Airbus A-380. Numerous flood barriers and barricades (Thames, Netherlands, Venice, ...). European Southern Observatory.[1]
Proposals for bridging the Straits of Gibralter, 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.
________________________________
Notes:
1. My focus is on technical rather than economic success here, though each project mentioned here did go operational, and all but Conocorde remain so. Economic viability is a challenge for most megaprojects.
Energiewende is a failure in both technical and economic senses: half a trillion euros spent to get a more expensive and less reliable power grid, and a fleet of perfectly functional nuclear power plants were spitefully binned.
The claim I was answering was that Europe was no longer willing or capable to undertake "really ambitious technical things".
Really ambitious technical things by their very nature have uncertain outcomes and may prove spectacular, or even slow-motion failures. Concorde was only very barely commercially viable (if that) and ultimately exhibited fatal engineering flaws, as well as susceptibility to alternative (though slower) private jets with more flexible scheduling; still, it flew commercially for 27 years. The Channel Tunnel would have bankrupted the corporation building and operating it (Eurotunnel) without government bailouts.[1] The Airbus A380 has similarly proved a commercial failure with production halted at 254 units built in 18 years, compare against Boeing's 747 with 1,574 units over 55 years.[2]
Even accepting your characterisation of Energiewende as a failure, which I do not, it absolutely IS a "really ambitoius technical" project. And hence refutes the specious assertions of ur-whale.
Personally glad they had the foresight not to do stupid things like this to beautiful natural environments...the only thing I find really sad about Europe is the lack of old growth forest.
I'm not an expert in this area, though the efficiencies of canal systems have interested me greatly in recent years. What's interesting to me is that even today, few canal systems seem to have elevation gains of more than a few metres.
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.
The C&O Canal (built as a competitor to the Erie Canal) has a 184m (605 ft) lift to get to Cumberland, which is where they gave up trying to reach the Ohio River, haven been beaten by their competitor, the B&O Railroad.
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.
Intermodal is one answer to "solving the hard bits". Stuff everything into a largish box, and move that between lorries, ships, rail, and whatever.
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.
> 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.
But you CAN put liquid and pressure vessels in a intermodal framework.
Here are pictures of many:
https://duckduckgo.com/?q=isotank&t=ffab&atb=v407-1&iax=imag...
You can do it, but ... it probably scales poorly.
The thing about bulk cargoes is that they are bulk. A total of one third of all commercial ships are bulk liquid petroleum carriers, and those ships devote all their storage capacity to one cargo: crude oil (or in some cases, refined hydrocarbons).
Similarly dry bulk carriers (ore, woodchips, fertilizer, grain), which are shipload cargoes.
Liquified natural gas is also typically shipped in dedicated vessels.
There are some instances where a smaller cargo allotment might be made, but those are almost always on very minor shipping routes.
A key concept in cargo is to use the largest and most standardised box size possible. Hence the standard 40 foot shipping container (the term TFU, or twenty-foot equivalent unit, is actually one half the size ultimately dominating the industry). In the case of bulk cargoes, a shipping container is still too small for most routes.
So: yes, what you describe exists, but it's a very minor element of total cargo movements.
My guess is that this is more about practicality than anything. There's hardly a need for such high elevation locks I think, and where there is, tunneling is better.
Or freight modalities which can handle grades intrinsically: rail, trucks, tramways, conveyor belts, sluices (for bulk goods).
I'm trying to think of regions where water-based high elevation gain might be at least within contemplation.
Inland water-based transport has fallen out of favour these days, not because there's anything wrong with it but because road and rail have got so much better in the last 150 years.
If canal technology had improved at the same rate and we had a magical economic way of building canals over huge mountains, like the one described in the article, of course we'd contemplate building more of them. Connect Denver to San Francisco, connect the Amazon to the Pacific via La Paz, connect Buenos Aires to Santiago, connect the Brahmaputra to the Pearl River over the Himalayas, connect Nagoya to the Sea of Japan via Kyoto.
I'm going to agree with others questioning your declaration of the death of water. River and canal traffic remains huge in numerous regions. The US, western Europe, Russia, and China all have immense canal-and-river systems, and move tremendous amounts of cargo by water, internally (that is, exclusive of ocean freight). And the connectivity is impressive.
New Orleans connects directly to Minneapolis, Chicago, much of the Ohio River Valley, I think to or near Omaha, up the Red River along the Texas-Oklahoma state line, and via the St. Lawrence Seaway to Toronto, Montreal, and ultimately the North Atlantic.
Central Europe has river transit from the North Sea (Hamburg, Amsterdam) to the Black and Baltic. Russia similarly has water routes from the Baltic to the Black Sea.
Much of the problem with routes such as SF <-> Denver is lack of water. The Great Basin is dry. The watershed for Los Angeles extends east 1,500 miles, to Denver, via the Colorado River, which is bled dry before it reaches the sea.
Further north, the Columbia-Missouri rivers nearly meet, and the dream of Louis & Clark could possibly come to be. Rail just happens to be far more practical.
> Inland water-based transport has fallen out of favour these days,
Where?
It's definitely not out of favour here. We are a water nation, but inland shipping for cross-border transport is at the same level as road transport, and an order of magnitude more than rail transport. https://opendata.cbs.nl/#/CBS/en/dataset/83101ENG/table
We've got the Rhine, but that's hardly the only navigable big river in the world. One of those has much more carrying capacity than a railway and a lower cost.
Water transport of goods is still a thriving business. Crops from farmers in the Columbia River Basin (Oregon, Washington, Idaho) get loaded as far inland as Coeur d'Alene, Idaho.
Dealing with BNSF and Union Pacific Railways is much more costly and complicated for your freight than getting a barge to transport it out to the Pacific Ocean.
This is also why the farmers here are so opposed to dam removal. There are lots of small silted up hydroelectric dams that serve no other purpose today besides making the upstream waterway navigable by boat, which you need if your trying to dodge the high price of trucking or train transport of your crop.
It is still somehow alive in Germany https://bmdv.bund.de/SharedDocs/EN/Articles/WS/waterways-as-...
> Up to 240 million tonnes of bulk goods are transported per year via the German Federal waterways, which amounts to around 65 billion tonne-kilometres. This equals almost 75 per cent of the goods transport by railway in this country or about 14 million lorry journeys.
In the Netherlands it's even more. Seems like the Dutch wikipage on the subject is far more comprehensive to the English one: https://nl.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Binnenvaart
Says over a quarter of freight goes by boot. Not surprising, seeing as how many small inland ports there are.
You have Canal du midi:189meter (max height) and 249m (ascending elevation) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canal_du_Midi
As far as I remember the South Penine Ring[0] in Northern England has a max elevation of ~200m/~650ft.
0: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/South_Pennine_Ring
I paddled through the Erie Canal's locks in Lockport (where I live) last weekend! A lot of history passed through here.
There’s no violation of physics here, simply the energy transfer of potential energy from water moving downhill.
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.
> Given a sufficient source of water above the highest tunnel
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?
That thing is scary. If a boat on an uphill tunnel doesn't keep moving forward to keep up with the rising water, the boat is forced against the top of the tunnel and everybody drowns.
You can probably put a catenary with wheels on top of your boat and alongside to forward sides to ensure pushing it against the roof pushes your boat forward.
It's for freight, though, and if I understand it correctly, the force of the upward movement is automatically converted to horizontal movement by the pulley/rail system. So there's potentially no need for anyone to be on the boat as it transits the tunnel.
Not that that this looks practical - the tunnels would be huge, just for starters.
Not that huge. This thing seems to have been scaled for narrowboats, like the old British canal system. Those have some tunnels, just barely big enough for the boats. Here's the longest canal tunnel in the UK.[1]
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.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9ETwZuu9yZ0
Wow yeah narrowboats were not the cutting edge of haulage in 1907.
Interesting about the Stand edge tunnel. I admit, I'm not that keen to go through it
> Newton’s apple fell from the tree for the same reason as water flows downwards
For the sake of the narrative?
I thought the author meant gravity.
The article describes it as some kind of magical thginnking, but it is possible to cross Europe by boat.
There are a couple of canal systems:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rhine-Main-Danube_Canal
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canal_du_Midi
Is there a demonstration of the locks somewhere? From the patent it sounds like a tunnel that gets flooded which lifts the ship. The tunnel must be really large because it has to fit the ship at an angle and not just head on.
https://patents.google.com/patent/US955317A/en
It's really more a pipe than a tunnel, the whole pipe needs to be able to support the weight of the boat and all the water to the top of each step
What is the difference between a pipe and a tunnel in this case?
a tunnel is supporting some downward pressure above it while a pip is resisting an outwards pressure from inside - a brick/stone arch might work for downwards pressure, but will just come apart if pushed from the inside - unlike the illustration they'd more likely need some reinforced concrete structure to support the weight of the water/boat
Johnny canal approves
This was back in the days when folks in Europe were still capable of doing really ambitious technical things.
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.
High speed rail? The large hadron collider at CERN? Also, Rail Baltica…
https://www.euronews.com/next/2023/09/16/the-high-speed-rail...
Also: Concorde. The Chunnel. The Gothard Base Tunnel. The Øresund Bridge/Tunnel. Airbus A-380. Numerous flood barriers and barricades (Thames, Netherlands, Venice, ...). European Southern Observatory.[1]
Proposals for bridging the Straits of Gibralter, 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.
________________________________
Notes:
1. My focus is on technical rather than economic success here, though each project mentioned here did go operational, and all but Conocorde remain so. Economic viability is a challenge for most megaprojects.
Energiewende is a failure in both technical and economic senses: half a trillion euros spent to get a more expensive and less reliable power grid, and a fleet of perfectly functional nuclear power plants were spitefully binned.
The claim I was answering was that Europe was no longer willing or capable to undertake "really ambitious technical things".
Really ambitious technical things by their very nature have uncertain outcomes and may prove spectacular, or even slow-motion failures. Concorde was only very barely commercially viable (if that) and ultimately exhibited fatal engineering flaws, as well as susceptibility to alternative (though slower) private jets with more flexible scheduling; still, it flew commercially for 27 years. The Channel Tunnel would have bankrupted the corporation building and operating it (Eurotunnel) without government bailouts.[1] The Airbus A380 has similarly proved a commercial failure with production halted at 254 units built in 18 years, compare against Boeing's 747 with 1,574 units over 55 years.[2]
Even accepting your characterisation of Energiewende as a failure, which I do not, it absolutely IS a "really ambitoius technical" project. And hence refutes the specious assertions of ur-whale.
________________________________
Notes:
1. "Megaprojects and Risk: An Anatomy of Ambition" <http://www.josephcoates.com/pdf_files/268_Megaprojects_and_R...> (PDF)
2. Wikipedia provides both Airbus's and Boeing's production years and units.
Not to mention that this thing hasn't been actually built.
That's terribly unsporting of you to point out ;-)
You mean the same Rail Baltica that has been delayed since forever?
Im not familiar with that one. I think he must mean the other Rail Baltica that was scheduled for 2025 but is now delayed until 2030
Personally glad they had the foresight not to do stupid things like this to beautiful natural environments...the only thing I find really sad about Europe is the lack of old growth forest.
Don't know what you are talking about (in this specific context). The size of the pictured ships/boats/barges seems rather small.
And thus would easily be matched or topped in capacity by anything rolling trough the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gotthard_Base_Tunnel , faster.
The Fehmarn Belt fixed link[0] is under construction right now.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fehmarn_Belt_fixed_link