You had claimed that if ships traveled at 14 knots, both routes would take the same time. Do you still maintain that or have you realized you were wrong?
The source uses an unrealistic time of 24 hours for unloading from ship to rail, transit time, and loading from rail to ship.
In reality, it takes 1-3 days to unload a container ship.
This means 2-6 days will be taken simply from the 2 extra transshipment instances counting only the ship side.
Add to that the time taken to do drayage from ship to rail and rail to ship.
Add to that the travel time.
The source claims ~17.2 days from Mumbai to Piraeus by sea at 10 knots.
If we do 14 knots, it would go to ~12.29 days.
The source claims 10 days from Mumbai to Piraeus by IMEC.
~5.6 days from Mumbai to UAE, ~3.4 days from Haifa to Piraeus.
If we do 14 knots, it would go from 9 days for the sea portion to ~6.43 days for the sea portion.
Their wildly unrealistic figure of 24 hours for unloading from ship to rail, transit time, and loading from rail to ship is truly laughable.
I'd say at 14 knots it should be about equal, and at 16 knots it will be decidedly faster by sea.
What speed? Ships usually get stuck at Suez canal for 5-7 days on average to just cross....go to any ship tracking website and see for yourself on how fast ships go usually. Most would be about 10 knots as Its economical when it comes to fuel consumption.
If one adds delays, something like IMEC is far more likely to have delays than the Suez Canal.
There are simply far more steps that can go wrong.