Container -Towards standards-Purpose-Built Ships-

History
A container ship being loaded by a portainer crane in Copenhagen Harbour.
Twistlocks which capture and constrain containers. Forklifts designed to handle containers have similar devices.

The introduction of containers resulted in vast improvements in port handling efficiency, thus lowering costs and helping lower freight charges and, in turn, boosting trade flows. Almost every manufactured product humans consume spends some time in a container.

Origins

Although having its origins in the late 1780s or earlier, the global standardisation of containers and container handling equipment was one of the important innovations in 20th century logistics.

By the 1830s, railroads on several continents were carrying containers that could be transferred to trucks or ships, but these containers were invariably small by today's standards. Originally used for shipping coal on and off barges, 'loose boxes' were used to containerize coal from the late 1780s, on places like the Bridgewater Canal. By the 1840s, iron boxes were in use as well as wooden ones. The early 1900s saw the adoption of closed container boxes designed for movement between road and rail.

In the United Kingdom, several railway companies were using similar containers by the beginning of the 20th century and in the 1920s the Railway Clearing House standardised the RCH container. Five or ten foot long, wooden and non-stackable, these early standard containers were a great success but the standard remained UK-specific.

From 1926 to 1947, in the US, the Chicago North Shore and Milwaukee Railway carried motor carrier vehicles and shippers' vehicles loaded on flatcars between Milwaukee, Wisconsin and Chicago, Illinois. Beginning in 1929, Seatrain Lines carried railroad boxcars on its sea vessels to transport goods between New York and Cuba. In the mid-1930s, the Chicago Great Western Railway and then the New Haven Railroad began "piggy-back" service (transporting highway freight trailers on flatcars) limited to their own railroads. By 1953, the CB&Q, the Chicago and Eastern Illinois and the Southern Pacific railroads had joined the innovation. Most cars were surplus flatcars equipped with new decks. By 1955, an additional 25 railroads had begun some form of piggy-back trailer service.

Toward the end of World War II, the United States Army began using specialized containers to speed up the loading and unloading of transport ships. The army used the term "transporters" to identify the containers, for shipping household goods of officers in the field. A "Transporter" was a reusable container, 8.5 feet (2.6 m) long, 6.25 feet (1.91 m) wide, and 6.83 feet (2.08 m) high, made of rigid steel with a carrying capacity of 9,000 pounds. During the Korean War the transporter was evaluated for handling sensitive military equipment, and proving effective, was approved for broader use. Theft of material and damage to wooden crates, in addition to handling time, by stevedores at the Port of Pusan, proved to the army that steel containers were needed. In 1952 the army began using the term CONEX, short for "Container Express". The first major shipment of CONEX's (containing engineering supplies and spare parts) were shipped by rail from the Columbus General Depot in Georgia to the Port of San Francisco, then by ship to Yokohama, Japan, and then to Korea, in late 1952. Shipment times were cut almost in half. By the time of the Vietnam War the majority of supplies and materials were shipped with the CONEX. After the U.S. Department of Defense standardized an 8'x8' cross section container in multiples of 10' lengths for military use it was rapidly adopted for shipping purposes.

These standards were adopted in the United Kingdom for containers and rapidly displaced the older wooden containers in the 1950s.

Even the railways of the USSR had their own small containers.

Purpose-built ships

Main article: Container ship

The first vessels purpose-built to carry containers began operation in Denmark in 1951. Ships began carrying containers between Seattle and Alaska in 1951. The world's first truly intermodal container system used the purpose-built container ship the Clifford J. Rodgers, built in Montreal in 1955 and owned by the White Pass and Yukon Route. Its first trip carried 600 containers between North Vancouver, British Columbia and Skagway, Alaska, on November 26, 1955; in Skagway, the containers were unloaded to purpose-built railroad cars for transport north to the Yukon, in the first intermodal service using trucks, ships and railroad cars. Southbound containers were loaded by shippers in the Yukon, moved by rail, ship and truck, to their consignees, without opening. This first intermodal system operated from November 1955 for many years.

The U.S. container shipping industry dates to 1956, when trucking entrepreneur Malcom McLean put 58 containers aboard a refitted tanker ship, the Ideal-X, and sailed them from Newark to Houston. What was new in the USA about McLean's innovation was the idea of using large containers that were never opened in transit between shipper and consignee and that were transferable on an intermodal basis, among trucks, ships and railroad cars. McLean had initially favored the construction of "trailerships" - taking trailers from large trucks and stowing them in a ship’s cargo hold. This method of stowage, referred to as roll-on/roll-off, was not adopted because of the large waste in potential cargo space onboard the vessel, known as broken stowage. Instead, he modified his original concept into loading just the containers, not the chassis, onto the ships, hence the designation container ship or "box" ship.[4][5] See also pantechnicon van and trolley and lift van.

Towards standards

During the first twenty years of growth containerization meant using completely different, and incompatible, container sizes and corner fittings from one country to another. There were dozens of incompatible container systems in the U.S. alone. Among the biggest operators, the Matson Navigation Company had a fleet of 24-foot (7.3 m) containers while Sea-Land Service, Inc used 35-foot (11 m) containers. The standard sizes and fitting and reinforcement norms that exist now evolved out of a series of compromises among international shipping companies, European railroads, U.S. railroads, and U.S. trucking companies. Four important ISO recommendations standardised containerisation globally[6]

* January 1968 - R-668 defined the terminology, dimensions and ratings
* July 1968 - R-790 defined the identification markings
* January 1970 - R-1161 made recommendations about corner fittings
* October 1970 - R-1897 set out the minimum internal dimensions of general purpose freight containers

In the United States, the Interstate Commerce Commission was created in 1887 to keep railroads from using monopolist pricing and rate discrimination on customers, especially rural Western farmers, but fell victim to regulatory capture, and by the 1960s, before any shipper could carry different items in the same vehicle, or change rates, the shipper had to have ICC approval, which impeded containerization and other advances in shipping. The United States' present fully integrated systems became possible only after the ICC's regulatory oversight was cut back (and later abolished in 1995), trucking and rail were deregulated in the 1970s and maritime rates were deregulated in 1984. [7]

Today

Containerization has revolutionized cargo shipping. Today, approximately 90% of non-bulk cargo worldwide moves by containers stacked on transport ships; 26% of all containers originate from China.[citation needed] As of 2005, some 18 million total containers make over 200 million trips per year. There are ships that can carry over 14,500 twenty-foot equivalent units (TEU), for example the "Emma Mærsk", 396 m long, launched August 2006. It has even been predicted that, at some point, container ships will be constrained in size only by the depth of the Straits of Malacca—one of the world's busiest shipping lanes—linking the Indian Ocean to the Pacific Ocean. This so-called Malaccamax size constrains a ship to dimensions of 470 m in length and 60 m wide (1542 feet by 197 feet).

However, few initially foresaw the extent of the influence containerization would bring to the shipping industry. In the 1950s, Harvard University economist Benjamin Chinitz predicted that containerization would benefit New York by allowing it to ship industrial goods produced there more cheaply to the Southern United States than other areas, but did not anticipate that containerization might make it cheaper to import such goods from abroad. Most economic studies of containerization merely assumed that shipping companies would begin to replace older forms of transportation with containerization, but did not predict that the process of containerization itself would have some influence on producers and the extent of trading.[5]
A converted container used as an office at a building site.

The widespread use of ISO standard containers has driven modifications in other freight-moving standards, gradually forcing removable truck bodies or swap bodies into the standard sizes and shapes (though without the strength needed to be stacked), and changing completely the worldwide use of freight pallets that fit into ISO containers or into commercial vehicles.

Improved cargo security is also an important benefit of containerization. The cargo is not visible to the casual viewer and thus is less likely to be stolen and the doors of the containers are generally sealed so that tampering is more evident. This has reduced the "falling off the truck" syndrome that long plagued the shipping industry.

Use of the same basic sizes of containers across the globe has lessened the problems caused by incompatible rail gauge sizes in different countries. The majority of the rail networks in the world operate on a 1,435 mm (4 ft 8½ in) gauge track known as standard gauge but many countries (such as Russia, Finland, and Spain) use broader gauges while many other countries in Africa and South America use narrower gauges on their networks. The use of container trains in all these countries makes trans-shipment between different gauge trains easier.