The Panama Canal

The Panama Canal :

The Panama Canal is a 48 mile (77 kilometers) long ship canal that connects the Atlantic and the Pacific Oceans. The canal was built from 1904 to 1914 and it was one of the most difficult engineering projects ever pioneered. The opening of the canal had a tremendous impact upon shipping between the two oceans, since all the boats en route from one ocean to the other did not have to route around the notorious Cape Horn anymore, America’s southernmost point.

Besides excavating immense volumes of earth, the project involved a serious upgrade of the Panama railway system, so that heavy-duty locomotives and railroad cars could be used to improve the efficiency of the work. During the construction period, the process of moving the land become so well-organized, that at one point 160 loaded dirt trains were used daily – that is one train leaving about every one and a half minutes of the day. More than 60,000,000 pounds (roughly 27,215,500 kilograms) of dynamite was used when constructing the canal. Since its inauguration, a total of 815,000 vessels have passed through the canal, making it one of the leading areas on Earth in terms of naval traffic.

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