You'd have to have top-of-the-line cargo handling to hope to compete, methinks. No breaking bulk allowed- you'd need high-cap cranes to pull the cargo containers at one end, put them straight onto rolling stock (no traditional boxcars allowed, the modified flatbeds that hold a container), and more high-cap cranes to load them at the other end. The rail line would have to go over the Negev Desert, which is not a fun environment You're talking hundreds of millions of dollars at the least in infrastructure costs, in one of the most politically volatile places on the planet and one of the physically narrowest parts of Israel.Simon_Jester wrote:You have an interesting point. If the railway can handle enough freight fast enough, it will certainly have that effect- though the time consumed in loading and offloading ships at the ports might cancel out the time consumed waiting in line to go through the canal.
I'm not holding my breath. If someone actually manages to line up investment for the project, I'll start to get excited- and ando is right that this would be very, very exciting if it happened. I just don't see it happening in the forseeable future.
(And for the paranoid, a high-cap rail line from the Elat region up to the Med would be easy for a hypothetical Egyptian, Jordanian, or Saudi invader to seize, and would give them a fast link almost to Tel Aviv. None of these countries are currently aggressive towards Israel at the moment, but governments can change- I'm sure I don't need to cite examples.)
The subs are Israel trying to overhaul their navy to protect offshore industries, which isn't something they've done historically- up until now their navy has mostly been oriented towards coast-defense, with lots of small, cheap missile boats and a few SSKs. Adding more submarines lets them project force into places like those gas fields without the problems associated with building larger ships like destroyers, which are manifold from Israel's point of view:I don't know. The extraction industry is all at sea, so having a navy means you can deter people from harassing it. It also helps you assert power over the waters around your country (an Israeli airbase in Cyprus would do the same thing for them), and in general means that you have more strength which can be made to be felt at greater distances from your country. So this can all be tied into "Israel is trying to strengthen its strategic position, with more control over broader reaches of the sea, and with its own economic route (that railway) that lets it present an alternative to the Suez Canal now that Egypt has become a possibly unstable and dangerous country."
- They're expensive to build and operate.
- They also consume a lot of manpower, which Israel has always been short on.
- They'd have to get someone to build the ships for them, which could be tough politically.
- They'd take time to come on line- figure a few years for construction, more to get the crews up to an acceptable level of readiness. The Israelis already know how to operate submarines, now.
Edit: Hit "submit" too soon, lost second half of post. Grrr...