Why the Thai Land Bridge is a bad idea

The Thai Land Bridge was proposed as an alternative to the Thai Canal. Here’s why it’s a bad idea.

The Thai Land Bridge is a proposed transport corridor in Southern Thailand connecting the Andaman Sea to the Gulf of Thailand. The proposal is an alternative to the Thai Canal (also known as the Kra Canal), which is a centuries-old dream to cut a canal across across the peninsula as a short cut to the Strait of Malacca.

The land bridge plan is to ship containers across the peninsula from Ranong to Chumphon by rail and road, which is about 90 km apart. There is also a plan for a pipeline to transfer oil across the peninsula. Expanded deep sea ports would be built at either end to accommodate ships.

This overland short cut is supposed to save 3 or 4 days of sailing time compared to sailing via Singapore. These reports don’t seem to account for the labour and inconvenience involved in unloading and reloading ships for such a small gain.

I’ve put together this article that explains why the land bridge project of Thailand is a bad idea.

Shipping basics

Before we begin, I will introduce some of the basic things to know about shipping containers and modern container ships.

Container sizes

A modern shipping container is known as a twenty-foot equivalent unit (TEU). Containers are standardised to the same size to fit any container ship. The dimensions of 1 TEU are:

Length: 20 ft (6.1 m)
Width: 8 ft (2.44 m)
Height: 8 ft 6 in (2.59 m)

[20-foot container (Gazouya-japan via Wikimedia Commons).]

There are also forty-foot equivalent unit containers (FEU) which can be stacked precisely on top of two twenty-foot containers. The dimensions of an FEU are:

Length: 40 ft (12.2 m)
Width: 8 ft (2.44 m)
Height: 8 ft 6 in (2.59 m)

1 forty-foot container is classified as 2 TEU. If a ship has the capacity for 5000 TEU it could be that it’s carrying 2500 forty-foot containers. Ships usually carry a mix of both sizes, so ships measure their container capacity in units of TEU rather than by the number of containers.

[40-foot and 20-foot containers (Torsten Bätge, Hamburg via Wikimedia Commons).]

Ship sizes

The capacity of container ships is another factor to consider when calculating the viability of the land bridge. Knowing how many containers that need to be transported over the peninsula will figure in the calculations.

The world’s largest container ship is the MSC Irina, which has a maximum capacity of 24,346 TEU.

[MSC Irina (vesselfinder.com).]

Perhaps the most famous of the large container ships is the Ever Given. The Ever Given was the ship that got stuck in the Suez Canal in 2021.

[Ever Given in Suez Canal viewed from ISS (NASA JSC ISS image library via Wikimedia Commons).]

The Ever Given has a capacity of 20,124 TEU. If this ship was British it would have a name like Long Boi or Absolute Unit. Ships are rarely registered in the great maritime nation of Great Britain, so there are no fun names like Boaty McBoatface.

The Ever Given is operated by Evergreen Marine Corporation from Taiwan, and the ship is registered in Panama. The ship is named by a naming convention using Ever + G in the name. Here is a list of all the G-type container ships (a list full of long bois and absolute units).

[Ever Given at Europoort, Rotterdam (© S.J. de Waard / CC-BY-SA-4.0 via Wikimedia Commons).]

I’ve shown these mega ships for reference, but for the purposes of calculations for the land bridge I will use ships in the “New Panamax” ship classification. As the name suggests, a New Panamax ship is the largest type of ship that can sail through the Panama Canal after the 2018 expansion project. A New Panamax ship has a capacity of up to 14,000 TEU.

The Thai land bridge was proposed as an alternative to the canal project. I will assume that the canal would have been built to accommodate New Panamax ships, so I will use 14,000 TEU as the number for ships using the land bridge.

Ship journey types

There are two types of journeys that a container ship can take: Direct shipping and Transshipment.

Direct shipping

Direct shipping is when a container ship goes from Port A to Port B without any stops on the way. All of the containers loaded on the ship at Port A will be unloaded at Port B.

Transshipment

Transshipment is when a ship stops at another port en route to its final destination, where it can unload and pick up new containers.

Why the Thai Land Bridge is a bad idea

Having introduced the basics of shipping I will break down the problems of the land bridge when used for either direct shipping or transshipment.

Using the land bridge for direct shipments

How would the land bridge operate if a ship wants to cross the peninsula with the same payload?

A ship going from east to west will arrive at the Chumphon port, where the containers are unloaded. Estimating the time to unload a container ship varies according to the size of the ship and the efficiency of the port. I have read reports that estimate between 1 to 3 days, and even up to 1 week.

This article describes the process of unloading a ship with over 20,000 TEU:

“It takes 3,000 people working three days in shifts around the clock to load and unload a giant ship with capacity for 20,000 containers when it stops at one of the world’s biggest ports. Every second counts as thousands of boxes are pulled off or loaded onto the deck. Docking and unloading what Maersk calls its Triple E ships involves a variety of people working in sync, from ship pilots and tug masters to customs officers, truck and train drivers, and crane operators.”

Let’s assume that no one in their right mind will want to unpack and repack one of these monster ships. The Port of Hamburg “hopes that shipping companies will soon stop deploying ever-larger container ships”.

For the land bridge calculations I’m using the New Panamax class of ships with a capacity of 14,000 TEU.

When the ship is unloaded at either port, the next thing to consider is where to place the containers. Are the containers stacked at the port first and then loaded onto trains, or are the containers loaded directly from the ship to the train?

The next question to ask is how many train trips will it take to send 14,000 TEU across the peninsula? I found varying estimates of freight train lengths. One report mentions that freight trains in China can carry 55 40ft-containers. That equals 110 TEU per train, so a ship with 14,000 TEU would need 128 trains that can haul 55 40ft-containers at a time.

[Do you really want to transport 7500 of these across the peninsula? Photo: China Daily.]

Once all of those trainloads of containers arrive at Ranong, the same questions are asked in reverse. Are the containers unloaded directly from the train to the ship, or are they offloaded first and then wait until they can me loaded onto the ship?

Then there is the big question which I have not seen any report address so far. There needs to be an empty ship of exactly the same size waiting on the other side. Did the ship come here to meet these containers, or was the ship coming from another job? what is the likelihood of the ship being ready at exactly the time when the containers arrive?

The whole point of this land bridge is to save 3 or 4 days of sailing time. These basic calculations suggest that there would not be any time savings, and maybe even take longer. To save time, the containers would need to be loaded directly from boat to train rather than being stacked at the port to wait to be loaded onto a train. Another consideration is if there is congestion at the port and the ship has to wait to dock.

[Ships anchored off the coast of Singapore. Will Ranong and Chumphon look like this?]

Using the Chumphon and Ranong ports as transshipment hubs

The next consideration are transshipments. Thailand wants to develop both ports so they can become transhipment hubs. The big problem with this is that Singapore is already a massive transshipment hub, and due to its strategic location it always will be. Port Klang in Malaysia is also a sizeable transshipment location, so Thailand will be competing with established ports.

To illustrate why building a transshipment hub is going to be a challenge, consider this shipping scenario.

Let’s say there is a ship going from Hong Kong to the Port of Mombasa in Kenya. There may only be half a ship worth of containers that need to go to Mombasa, but the ship is going via Singapore where it can pick up other containers.

Rather than sailing from Hong Kong to Singapore with half a boatload, the ship can carry containers to Singapore that are going elsewhere. For example the ship might have 100 containers that need to go to Darwin in Australia. There are no ships going direct from Hong Kong to Darwin, but there is a ship scheduled to go from Singapore to Darwin. Those containers are unloaded in Singapore where they can be loaded onto the ship to Darwin.

The ship from Hong Kong can then load more containers in Singapore that are bound for Mombasa. There are so many ships going to Singapore that the Hong Kong ship will have enough containers to pick up to fill its ship.

If this ship takes the land bridge short cut, it would arrive at Chumphon port to find no containers that are waiting to go to Mombasa. If only a limited amount of ships are going to the Thailand ports, then why would a shipping company go there.

Another problem with Thailand’s proposal is there are two ports in their plan, and a transhipment hub works better when all the ships meet at one port.

If you come at the king, you best not miss

There is talk of the land bridge being a Malacca Straits Killer and a genuine alternative to shipping via Singapore.

For Thailand to make transhipment work, it would need to build Tuas-sized ports in Ranong and Chumphon. Meanwhile, Singapore is spending $14 billion USD over 20 years to build the world’s largest fully automated port. There is no way that Thailand is going to replicate Tuas, twice.

[Tuas Mega Port.]

Thailand wants to spend a trillion baht on this land bridge dream, but it still won’t be enough to be an alternative to Singapore.

What Thailand should do instead

The land bridge is a bad idea, and the sooner this idea is killed off the better. This report just covers the logistics of moving tens of thousands of shipping containers across the peninsula per day. I haven’t even touched on the environmental impact of expanding two deep sea ports, or the problems of a corridor of non-stop freight trains running across the land.

This is the very definition of a logistical nightmare, which is defined as a “situation or event that requires considerable coordination of many people or resources, beyond the original organizer’s expectations.”

Should Thailand revert back to the original canal proposal? That would genuinely save days of sailing time without the hassle of unloading and reloading ships, but it comes with huge technical, environmental, and local political problems to solve.

There is merit in expanding the Ranang port and using that as Thailand’s west-facing port. Containers could be transported with the proposed Ranong to Chumphon railway that was planned for freight and passengers. The same environmental questions would still need to be asked regarding more ships passing through this part of the Andaman Sea.

Perhaps Thailand could give up on the idea of this short cut altogether and spend the money on other development projects. The land bridge is supposedly going to benefit all southerners, but all it is doing is creating a traffic sewer across the peninsula.

Why not spend a trillion baht on making truly great cities in the south. Make Chumphon, Ranong, and Hat Yai great global destinations that people want to spend time in. Build a regional railway along the Andaman coast to help spread tourism beyond Phuket. Start thinking about how to make southern cities more appealing and help decentralise away from Bangkok. Southern economic prosperity doesn’t have to rely on a bridge or canal project.