Container Shipping

Containerization is a system of intermodal freight transport using intermodal containers (also called shipping containers and ISO containers). Containerization is also referred as "Container Stuffing" or "Container Loading", which is the process of unitization of cargoes in exports. Containerization is the predominant form of unitization of export cargoes, as opposed to other systems such as the barge system or palletization. The containers have standardized dimensions. They can be loaded and unloaded, stacked, transported efficiently over long distances, and transferred from one mode of transport to another— container ships, rail transport flatcars, and semi-trailer trucks—without being opened. The handling system is completely mechanized so that all handling is done with cranes and special forklift trucks. All containers are numbered and tracked using computerized systems.

Containerization originated several centuries ago but was not well developed or widely applied until after World War II, when it dramatically reduced the costs of transport, supported the post-war boom in international trade, and was a major element in globalization. Containerization eliminated manual sorting of most shipments and the need for dockfront warehouses. It displaced many thousands of dock workers who formerly handled break bulk cargo. Containerization reduced congestion in ports, significantly shortened shipping time, and reduced losses from damage and theft.

Containers can be made from a wide range of materials such as steel, fibre-reinforced polymer, aluminum or a combination. Containers made from weathering steel are used to minimize maintenance needs.

Origin

Before containerization, goods were usually handled manually as break bulk cargo. Typically, goods would be loaded onto a vehicle from the factory and taken to a port warehouse where they would be offloaded and stored awaiting the next vessel. When the vessel arrived, they would be moved to the side of the ship along with other cargo to be lowered or carried into the hold and packed by dock workers. The ship might call at several other ports before off-loading a given consignment of cargo. Each port visit would delay the delivery of other cargo. Delivered cargo might then have been offloaded into another warehouse before being picked up and delivered to its destination. Multiple handling and delays made transport costly, time-consuming and unreliable.

Containerization has its origins in early coal mining regions in England beginning in the late 18th century. In 1766 James Brindley designed the box boat 'Starvationer' with ten wooden containers, to transport coal from Worsley Delph (quarry) to Manchester by Bridgewater Canal. In 1795, Benjamin Outram opened the Little Eaton Gangway, upon which coal was carried in wagons built at his Butterley Ironwork. The horse-drawn wheeled wagons on the gangway took the form of containers, which, loaded with coal, could be transshipped from canal barges on the Derby Canal, which Outram had also promoted.

By the 1830s, railroads on several continents were carrying containers that could be transferred to other modes of transport. The Liverpool and Manchester Railway in the UK was one of these. "Simple rectangular timber boxes, four to a wagon, they were used to convey coal from the Lancashire collieries to Liverpool, where they were transferred to horse-drawn carts by crane." Originally used for moving coal on and off barges, "loose boxes" were used to containerize coal from the late 1780s, at 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.

Twentieth century

On 17 May 1917, Benjamin Franklin Fitch inaugurated exploitation of an experimental installation for transfer of the containers called demountable bodies based on his design in Cincinnati, Ohio in the US. Later in 1919, his system was extended to over 200 containers serving 21 railway stations with 14 freight trucks.

In 1919, Stanisław Rodowicz, an engineer, developed the first draft of the container system in Poland. In 1920, he built a prototype of the biaxial wagon. The Polish-Bolshevik War stopped development of the container system in Poland.

The US Post Office contracted with the New York Central Railroad to move mail via containers in May 1921. In 1930, the Chicago & Northwestern Railroad began shipping containers between Chicago and Milwaukee. Their efforts ended in the spring of 1931 when the Interstate Commerce Commission disallowed the use of a flat rate for the containers.

In 1926, a regular connection of the luxury passenger train from London to Paris, Golden Arrow/ Fleche d'Or, by Southern Railway and French Northern Railway, began. For transport of passengers' baggage four containers were used. These containers were loaded in London or Paris and carried to ports, Dover or Calais, on flat cars in the UK and "CIWL Pullman Golden Arrow Fourgon of CIWL" in France. At the Second World Motor Transport Congress in Rome, September 1928, Italian senator Silvio Crespi proposed the use of containers for road and railway transport systems, using collaboration rather than competition. This would be done under the auspices of an international organ similar to the Sleeping Car Company, which provided international carriage of passengers in sleeping wagons. In 1928 Pennsylvania Railroad (PRR) started regular container service in the northeast US. After the Wall Street Crash of 1929 in New York and the subsequent Great Depression, many countries were without any means to transport cargo. The railroads were sought as a possibility to transport cargo, and there was an opportunity to bring containers into broader use. In February 1931 the first container ship was launched. It was called the Autocarrier, owned by Southern Railway UK. It had 21 slots for containers of Southern Railway. Under auspices of the International Chamber of Commerce in Paris in Venice on September 30, 1931, on one of the platforms of the Maritime Station (Mole di Ponente), practical tests assessed the best construction for European containers as part of an international competition.

In 1931, in the US Benjamin Franklin Fitch designed the two largest and heaviest containers in existence. One measured by by with a capacity of in , and a second measured by by , with a capacity of in .

In November 1932 in Enola, PA the first container terminal in the world was opened by the Pennsylvania Railroad. The Fitch hooking system was used for reloading of the containers.

The development of containerization was created in Europe and the US as a way to revitalize rail companies after the Wall Street Crash of 1929, which had caused economic collapse and reduction in use of all modes of transport.

In 1933 in Europe under the auspices of the International Chamber of Commerce the International Container Bureau (French: ''Bureau International des Conteneurs'', B.I.C.) was established. In June 1933, the B.I.C. decided on obligatory parameters for containers used in international traffic. Containers handled by means of lifting gear, such as cranes, overhead conveyors, etc. for traveling elevators (group I containers), constructed after July 1, 1933. Obligatory Regulations:
* Clause 1. Containers are, as regards form, either of the closed or the open type, and, as regards capacity, either of the heavy or the light type.
* Clause 2. The loading capacity of containers must be such that their total weight (load, plus tare) is: for containers of the heavy type; for containers of the light type; a tolerance of 5 percent excess on the total weight is allowable under the same conditions as for wagon loads.

In April 1935 BIC established a second standard for European containers:

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 " piggyback" service (transporting highway freight trailers on flatcars) limited to their own railroads. The Chicago Great Western Railway filed a US patent in 1938 on their method of securing trailers to a flatcars using chains and turnbuckles. Other components included wheel chocks and ramps for loading and unloading the trailers from the flatcars. By 1953, the Chicago, Burlington and Quincy, the Chicago and Eastern Illinois, and the Southern Pacific railroads had joined the innovation. Most of the railcars used were surplus flatcars equipped with new decks. By 1955, an additional 25 railroads had begun some form of piggyback trailer service.

World War II

During WWII, the Australian Army used containers to more easily deal with various breaks of gauge in the railroads. These non-stackable containers were about the size of the later 20-foot ISO container and perhaps made mainly of wood.

During the same time, the United States Army started to combine items of uniform size, lashing them onto a pallet, unitizing cargo to speed the loading and unloading of transport ships. In 1947 the Transportation Corps developed the ''Transporter'', a rigid, corrugated steel container with a carrying capacity, for shipping household goods of officers in the field. It was long, , and high, with double doors on one end, mounted on skids, and had lifting rings on the top four corners. 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 convinced the army that steel containers were needed.

Mid-twentieth century

In April 1951, at Zürich Tiefenbrunnen railway station, the Swiss Museum of Transport and '' Bureau International des Containers'' (BIC) held demonstrations of container systems, with the aim of selecting the best solution for Western Europe. Present were representatives from France, Belgium, the Netherlands, Germany, Switzerland, Sweden, Great Britain, Italy and the United States. The system chosen for Western Europe was based on the Netherlands' system for consumer goods and waste transportation called ''Laadkisten'' (literally, "loading bins"), in use since 1934. This system used roller containers that were moved by rail, truck and ship, in various configurations up to a capacity of , and up to size. This became the first post World War II European railway standard UIC 590, known as "pa-Behälter." It was implemented in the Netherlands, Belgium, Luxembourg, West Germany, Switzerland, Sweden and Denmark.
With the popularization of the larger ISO containers, support for pa containers was phased out by the railways. In the 1970s they began to be widely used for transporting waste.

In 1952 the US Army developed the Transporter into the CONtainer EXpress or CONEX box system. The size and capacity of the Conex were about the same as the Transporter, but the system was made ''modular'', by the addition of a smaller, half-size unit of long, wide and high.Development of Containerization // J. van Ham, J. Rijsenbrij
Steel containers
(page 8) CONEXes could be stacked three high, and protected their contents from the elements.

The first major shipment of CONEXes, containing engineering supplies and spare parts, was made 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. Transit times were almost halved. By the time of the Vietnam War the majority of supplies and materials were shipped by CONEX. By 1965 the US military used some 100,000 Conex boxes, and more than 200,000 in 1967. making this the first worldwide application of intermodal containers. After the US Department of Defense standardized an cross section container in multiples of lengths for military use, it was rapidly adopted for shipping purposes.

In 1955, former trucking company owner Malcom McLean worked with engineer Keith Tantlinger to develop the modern intermodal container. The challenge was to design a shipping container that could efficiently be loaded onto ships and would hold securely on sea voyages. The result was an tall by wide box in -long units constructed from thick corrugated steel. The design incorporated a twistlock mechanism atop each of the four corners, allowing the container to be easily secured and lifted using cranes. After helping McLean create the successful design, Tantlinger convinced him to give the patented designs to industry. This began international standardization of shipping containers.

Purpose-built ships

The first vessels purpose-built to carry containers had begun operation in 1926 for the regular connection of the luxury passenger train between London and Paris, the Golden Arrow/ Fleche d'Or. Four containers were used for the conveyance of passengers' baggage. These containers were loaded in London or Paris and carried to the ports of Dover or Calais. In February 1931 the first container ship in the world was launched. It was called the Autocarrier, owned by Southern Railway UK. It had 21 slots for containers of Southern Railway.

The next step was in Europe was after WW II. Vessels purpose-built to carry containers were used between UK and Netherlands and also in Denmark in 1951. In the United States, ships began carrying containers in 1951, between Seattle, Washington and Alaska. None of these services was particularly successful. First, the containers were rather small, with 52% of them having a volume of less than . Almost all European containers were made of wood and used canvas lids, and they required additional equipment for loading into rail or truck bodies.

The world's first purpose-built container vessel was ''Clifford J. Rodgers'', built in Montreal in 1955 and owned by the White Pass and Yukon Corporation. Her 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 Yukon, in the first intermodal service using trucks, ships, and railroad cars. Southbound containers were loaded by shippers in Yukon and moved by rail, ship, and truck to their consignees without opening. This first intermodal system operated from November 1955 until 1982.

The first truly successful container shipping company dates to April 26, 1956, when American trucking entrepreneur McLean put 58 ''trailer vans'' later called containers, aboard a refitted tanker ship, the , and sailed them from Newark, New Jersey to Houston, Texas. Independently of the events in Canada, McLean had the idea of using large containers that never opened in transit 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 on board the vessel, known as broken stowage. Instead, McLean modified his original concept into loading just the containers, not the chassis, onto the ship; hence the designation "container ship" or "box" ship.Cudahy, Brian J.
"The Containership Revolution: Malcom McLean's 1956 Innovation Goes Global"
''TR News''. (c/o National Academy of Sciences). Number 246. September–October 2006Levinson (2006), ''The Box''. (See also pantechnicon van and trolley and lift van.)

Toward standards

During the first 20 years of containerization, many container sizes and corner fittings were used. There were dozens of incompatible container systems in the US alone. Among the biggest operators, the Matson Navigation Company had a fleet of containers, while Sea-Land Service, Inc used containers. The standard sizes and fitting and reinforcement norms that now exist evolved out of a series of compromises among international shipping companies, European railroads, US railroads, and US trucking companies. Four important ISO ( International Organization for Standardization) recommendations standardized containerization globally:Rushton, A., Oxley, J., Croucher, P. (2004). ''The Handbook of Logistics and Distribution Management''. Kogan Page: London.
* January 1968: ISO 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.

Based on these standards, the first TEU container ship was the Japanese ' from shipowner NYK, which started sailing in 1968 and could carry 752 TEU containers.

In the US, containerization and other advances in shipping were impeded by the Interstate Commerce Commission (ICC), which was created in 1887 to keep railroads from using monopolist pricing and rate discrimination, but fell victim to regulatory capture. By the 1960s, ICC approval was required before any shipper could carry different items in the same vehicle or change rates. The fully integrated systems in the US today became possible only after the ICC's regulatory oversight was cut back (and abolished in 1995). Trucking and rail were deregulated in the 1970s and maritime rates were deregulated in 1984.

Double-stacked rail transport, where containers are stacked two high on railway cars, was introduced in the US. The concept was developed by Sea-Land and the Southern Pacific railroad. The first standalone double-stack container car (or single-unit 40-ft COFC well car) was delivered in July 1977. The five-unit well car, the industry standard, appeared in 1981. Initially, these double-stack railway cars were deployed in regular train service. Ever since American President Lines initiated in 1984 a dedicated double-stack container train service between Los Angeles and Chicago, transport volumes increased rapidly.

Effects

Containerization greatly reduced the expense of international trade and increased its speed, especially of consumer goods and commodities. It also dramatically changed the character of port cities worldwide. Prior to highly mechanized container transfers, crews of 20 to 22 longshoremen would pack individual cargoes into the hold of a ship. After containerization, large crews of longshoremen were not necessary at port facilities, and the profession changed drastically.

Meanwhile, the port facilities needed to support containerization changed. One effect was the decline of some ports and the rise of others. At the Port of San Francisco, the former piers used for loading and unloading were no longer required, but there was little room to build the vast holding lots needed for storing and sorting containers in transit between different transport modes. As a result, the Port of San Francisco essentially ceased to function as a major commercial port, but the neighboring Port of Oakland emerged as the second largest on the US West Coast. A similar fate occurred with the relationship between the ports of Manhattan and New Jersey. In the UK, the Port of London and Port of Liverpool declined in importance. Meanwhile, Britain's Port of Felixstowe and Port of Rotterdam in the Netherlands emerged as major ports.

In general, containerization caused inland ports on waterways incapable of receiving deep- draft ship traffic to decline in favor of seaports, which then built vast container terminals next to deep oceanfront harbors in lieu of the dockfront warehouses that had formerly handled break bulk cargo. With intermodal containers, the jobs of packing, unpacking, and sorting cargoes could be performed far from the point of embarkation. Such work shifted to gigantic warehouses in rural inland towns, where land and labor were much cheaper than in oceanfront cities. This fundamental transformation of where warehouse work was performed freed up valuable waterfront real estate near the central business districts of port cities around the world for redevelopment and led to a plethora of waterfront revitalization projects (such as warehouse districts).

The effects of containerization rapidly spread beyond the shipping industry. Containers were quickly adopted by trucking and rail transport industries for cargo transport not involving sea transport. Manufacturing also evolved to adapt to take advantage of containers. Companies that once sent small consignments began grouping them into containers. Many cargoes are now designed to precisely fit containers. The reliability of containers made just in time manufacturing possible as component suppliers could deliver specific components on regular fixed schedules.

In 2004, global container traffic was 354 million TEUs, of which 82 percent were handled by the world's top 100 container ports.

Twenty-first century

, approximately 90% of non- bulk cargo worldwide is moved by containers stacked on transport ships; 26% of all container transshipment is carried out in China. For example, in 2009 there were 105,976,701 transshipments in China (both international and coastal, excluding Hong Kong), 21,040,096 in Hong Kong (which is listed separately), and only 34,299,572 in the United States. In 2005, some 18 million containers made over 200 million trips per year. Some ships can carry over , such as the '' Emma Mærsk'', long, launched in August 2006. It has 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 in length and wide.

Few foresaw the extent of the influence of containerization on the shipping industry. In the 1950s, Harvard University economist Benjamin Chinitz