WI: Río Atrato connects the Atlantic and Pacific?

From everything I read, a certain Colombian river near the Colombia-Panama border, the Río Atrato, was and has been proposed for an inter-ocean canal. The river's course comes very close to the Pacific Ocean--from there, you'd make a cut in the divide between Atlantic and Pacific and route the waters to a nearby river going to the Pacific, thus making your canal. The Panama Canal does not seem to merely have been a competition between Panama and Nicaragua. For instance, Alexander von Humboldt considered the Atrato River to be a very good choice to build that inter-ocean canal.

I think the implications of this place being chosen for the "Panama Canal" are huge. Either you have your "Republic of Panama" include the region around the Río Atrato, or else Colombia keeps Panama and the builders of the Canal just forge an "Atrato Canal Zone" instead.

And then there's also the matter if this old proposal was revived and, say, China decided to invest in making the "Atrato Canal" happen, instead of their current (and by the looks of things, stalled) investment in the Nicaragua Canal. What is the maximum potential of the "Atrato Canal"? Is it easily expandable to be post-Panamax? What does look apparent is that the potential of environmental destruction, as the Nicaragua Canal has been criticised for, is less with the Atrato Canal, although it would pollute several river basins as well as flood much of the rainforest in the region. Despite that, it still is less than doomsday predictions of the Nicaragua Canal's ecological impact.

And one more thing, this would be absolutely huge for the city of Quibdó in Colombia, which is positioned along the Atrato and would thus receive a huge amount of commerce from the canal. How important can Quibdó get being the interoceanic city?

This is an interesting article, in Spanish however, as most articles on this proposal are.
 
IIRC, given the unstable geology, chopping through the Continental Divide was a mountain range too far for the French, the US, even the Chinese...

The big advantage of the OTL Panama route was that lake which allowed locks to be 'topped up' without pumping. Even so, the geology proved a nightmare. The insects, endless land-slips and base-heaves broke the French. Those mosquitos sprayed and better steam-shovels deployed with military precision, the US won through. But, the Canal authorities are *still* in a running battle with the geology...
 
Yeah, there is no perfect route between the Atlantic and Pacific in that vicinity. We assume that Panama in OTL was the better route. But there isn't an easy route regardless. You're gonna be punching through the backbone of the Americas anyway.

Now, was the Río Atrato proposal truly impossible in the late 19th century? Even assuming you do something with the tropical disease and you bring some good equipment?

China I think could do something with this now, assuming the right deals are made with Colombia which China seems to have made with Nicaragua.
 
Without that natural lake as a start, you've the additional problem of damming a bare river to provide a 'header tank' to top-up the locks. IIRC, those mountains have truly ghastly geology, literally will not hold water. They're so porous, the dam would undermine and collapse long before full to working level. And that if land-slips triggered by the rising water table didn't just wash the dam away...

Modern construction techniques include freezing, grouting, bolting etc etc but, IMHO, would still struggle.
YMMV.
 
Without that natural lake as a start, you've the additional problem of damming a bare river to provide a 'header tank' to top-up the locks. IIRC, those mountains have truly ghastly geology, literally will not hold water. They're so porous, the dam would undermine and collapse long before full to working level. And that if land-slips triggered by the rising water table didn't just wash the dam away...

Modern construction techniques include freezing, grouting, bolting etc etc but, IMHO, would still struggle.
YMMV.

So basically, this is absolutely not something they could've done a 100-120 years ago? And something that nowadays you would only do if you prioritised the environment of Nicaragua over that of the Atrato basin?

Could they have gone for an aquatic tunnel instead of a canal?

Or just a rail tunnel?

Wouldn't that mean that ships as big as Panamax wouldn't fit, thus your version of an "Atratomax" ship would be smaller?
 
If you have a rail link, tunneled or not, you still have the problem of building two BIG ports. This when stuff came in casks, barrels, sacks and crates, had to be trans-shipped by stevedores. Okay, it would provide an incentive to modularise, if not containerise, but I don't think this will work at that time.

UK did several long canal-boat tunnels through good rock but, IIRC, they were rail sized. I don't know of any larger...

The problems of building a tunnel through unstable geology are seriously non-trivial. The Alpine rail links bought progress with blood. Any big tunnel in the Isthmus is a disaster waiting to happen...
 
If you have a rail link, tunneled or not, you still have the problem of building two BIG ports. This when stuff came in casks, barrels, sacks and crates, had to be trans-shipped by stevedores. Okay, it would provide an incentive to modularise, if not containerise, but I don't think this will work at that time.

UK did several long canal-boat tunnels through good rock but, IIRC, they were rail sized. I don't know of any larger...

The problems of building a tunnel through unstable geology are seriously non-trivial. The Alpine rail links bought progress with blood. Any big tunnel in the Isthmus is a disaster waiting to happen...

On the Atlantic, your port would be Quibdó, as I said. On the Pacific, I'm not sure, but you'd see a city grow up there which otherwise wouldn't. Quibdó, at least, I believe had to have something back in the late 19th century since it was an important regional city. It still would take expansion, but that wouldn't be the problem compared to punching through the mountain range.

Is the geology really that bad? I think we can tell that any canal with the Río Atrato will come drenched in the blood of locals, not that the builders in the US or Europe will care. But I repeat, was this ever a possibility in the 19th century?
 
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