The small locomotives running along the top of the Panama Canal’s lock walls look like they’re towing the ship through — they aren’t. The ship moves under its own engine the entire way; the locomotives never touch the water.
What they actually do is hold the hull centered, cable taut on one wall and slack on the other, correcting sideways drift so a steel hull the size of a building never touches the concrete. Four to eight locomotives run the process together, one per mooring point, synchronizing tension as the lock fills and the hull rises. The method dates to the canal’s 1914 opening, and the wider locks Panama added in 2016 still use the same towing principle.
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Very interesting.
I did not know this. All these years I thought the railway cars were moving the big ships through the locks. I'm in my late 70s and somewhere decades earlier, misinformation got out about that and I never heard different. Thanks for sharing the truth😊
What gets me is that the locomotives supply zero forward thrust — their entire job is correcting a few centimeters of drift before it becomes a collision. If the cable synchronization on one wall failed for a moment, what happens first: the hull drifts into the concrete, or the ship's own engine overcorrects?