⛴Supply chains

a holiday rail and port weekend in Japan, a dated release on an African waterway, and a river still too low to load

Too much water in four places, not enough in one, and only two of them come with a date. Japan is the week's biggest sequencing problem: rain into eastern Japan from Saturday on ground at about 365 percent of normal puts Shinkansen and commuter-rail suspension planning, Tokyo-Bay and Izu ferry and port-call sequencing and slope and drainage watch onto a holiday weekend, when the network is already at its busiest. Nigeria's Benue corridor carries rain flooding now and a regulated release from today, which puts river crossings and inland-waterway movements on a known seven-day ramp instead of a surprise. Southern Vietnam takes a five-day spell over the country's main logistics region from today, and the Philippines' Palawan low is an inter-island question across the Visayas. Against all of that the Rhine at Kaub reads 24.0 cm, down 3 cm to a fresh low, which keeps barge loading constrained without offering a planner a date to work toward. Buy schedule buffer for the weekend, or hold capacity for the Japanese holiday — that is the trade.

carried on 40 of the last 63 editions — since Jul 5, the 10 most recent shown.