Does anyone have a info when the new canal is supposeto open? Is there any pictures out there? What equipment is being used by the Chineese there? Suppose to be big enough to handle all the super container ships. I haven't seen any conversation about and was wondering. Tks
I heard Newt Gingrich mention 2014 as the opening date of the wider canal. Don't know if that is right or not, but he just said it on the news literally a few minutes ago.
This panama Canal reallymust be a secret? Haven't been able to find much about it or anyone talking about it.
Try this, it's the canal's website. It also mentions an opening in 2014. http://www.pancanal.com/eng/expansion/ As for equipment being used, I know they have 2 or 3 Terex RH120Es loading 777Fs. I also know they have a Liebherr 9250 and some smaller haul trucks like 773s and wiggle wagons, but I'm not sure of an actual equipment list.
There was a tv show a couple years ago about the expansion. I want to say it was on Discovery, or The Science Channel. One of those Build it Bigger type shows.
I got curious so I went to youtube. Here is a very informational video about the expansion and shipping routes. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J2txiUx4meE
I keep thinking about how in the video it talked about the railroads raising the tunnels to haul containers stacked 2-high. The railroads seem to be investing an aweful lot into expanding.
Oct 2010, I went to the Panama Canal - Miraflores locks. These are the original locks on the Pacific side. I couldn't see much of the expansion work from that location but you could see some of the mountain side work from the airplane. It was a magnificent experience to stand their and watch a 100 year old lock lower ships into the Pacific. What's just as interesting as the current expansion is how the original canal was built. The political history of the Canal is quite interesting too but fast forward past the French failure and the alternate route many in Congress wanted that went through Nicaragua and the ingenuity that went into building the original canal was astounding, especially for the time. A large portion of Panama City is built on fill that was transported by railcars and dumped into the Pacific Ocean. They would set out rail spurs on the leading edge of the fill. The locomotives would push the loaded cars out the rail spur and dump their loads. (The railcars were side dumps.) When the fill edge was completed, they had a specialized crane mounted on a rail car that would move the tracks over to the new fill edge and they would repeat the process many times over. There is a museum at the Miraflores locks that really goes into depth the methods of construction for the canal. It was fascinating to me but the better 1/2 was bored after the first hour. There are some construction pictures from the current Canal expansion on the website Alco posted - http://www.pancanal.com/eng/expansion/mm/list-gallery/index2.html There are a few members here from Panama, maybe they will chime in.
Another neat way I've seen that they used for moving material, was to load flat cars directly with the shovels. When they got to the dump site, they had a giant plow they would drag along the decks of the flat cars, and effectively doze off the material.
You can see some heavy equipment working on Google Earth on the west end. 9°16'10.61"N 79°54'45.76"W The photos on my version were taken Christmas day 2009 so a couple of years ago.