The Path Between the Seas

by David McCullough

Changes have been made in the canal as time passed: the Cut was widened to five hundred feet, a storage dam was built across the Chagres about ten miles above Gamboa, and the original towing locomotives were retired and replaced by more powerful models made in Japan. But fundamentally, and for all general appearances, the canal remains the same as the day it opened and its basic plan has been challenged in only one respect. It has been argued that the separation of the two sets of locks at the Pacific end was a blunder, that it would have been a more efficient canal had the Pacific locks been built as a unit at Miraflores, just as at Gatun. But those who have had the most experience with running the canal in recent years do not regard the Pacific arrangement as a limiting factor, and indeed various tests run by the Panama Canal Company through the years indicate that Gatun is actually more of a bottleneck. With certain improvements, the engineers believe the capacity of the present canal could be increased to about twenty-seven thousand ships a year.