Probably because trains are limited in both weight and volume compared to ships and also less efficient. If you have this short route and know it’ll need this amount of cargo shipped it likely makes sense.

This single ship can carry more containers than any train could be expected to pull, likely by at least one order of magnitude.

All in all I’d guess the advantages are roughly:

• Reduced staff
• reduced energy use (land based shipping is less efficient almost by default)
• no need for infrastructure except ports (if you assume there is no train line or this shipping would move existing lines over capacity building this ship is likely cheaper or at least in line with 300km of rail)
• simpler logistics (loading / unloading)

Disadvantages:

• Speed (a train would likely move at 3-5x the speed)

I would also not expect the risk for catastrophic fires to be all that high. This ship has the batteries be containers. So once you’ve designed a container that is a large battery, you’ve already spent so much that a proper BMS including proper battery fire suppression as well as proper breakers/contractors are things you’ve built into it without even thinking about cost. The separation provided by building containers as the battery is the next line of defence if one container fails spectacularly, it also allows the batteries to be maintained on land, much cheaper than if they were part of the ship.

So I mostly fried the SSD by using it to write and rewrite ML checkpoints and logs, this in turn made the device read only and I somehow managed to migrate to a different SSD probably using clonezilla or something, but it messed up the bootloader so I installed refind in a new partition, configured it and voila it works. It’s scary because you need to do everything without seeing your system even half alive anywhere along the process, but it’s not actually hard, just copying data and installing/configuring a bootloader. But for a then 20year old at his more or less first job my head was on fire for the 1.5 days this took.

By far the most difficult single thing that I’ve ever had to fix that actually had to do with the system.

I now don’t flood my SSDs with data that is constantly rewritten.

But only for the 4 weeks a year you spend in unusually cold weather, the other 48 it’s more efficient.

It’s not like truly arctic places are a reasonable application but the overwhelming majority of our population lives south of Quebec and north of Wellington. So it’s not a relevant point, everyone in the Arctic can just use resistive heating or burn fuel, and if we get everything else on heat pumps we reduce our enegy use by a factor of 2-3 regardles.