Origins
Containerisation has its origins in early coal mining regions in England and Germany from the late 1700s on The global standardization of containers and container handling equipment was an important innovation in 20th century logistics.
By the 1830s, railroads on several continents were carrying containers that could be transferred to other modes of transport. 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.
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.[2] 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.
In 1955, businessman (and 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 and devise a method of loading and locking them onto ships. The result was a 8 feet (2.4 m) tall by 8 ft (2.4 m) wide box in 10 ft (3.0 m) long units constructed from 25 mm (0.98 in) thick corrugated steel. The design incorporated a twist-lock mechanism atop each of the four corners, allowing the container to be easily secured and lifted using cranes. Helping McLean make the successful design, Tantlinger convinced McLean to give the patented designs to the industry; this began international standardization of shipping containers.
Toward the end of World War II, the United States Army used specialized containers to speed 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 longshoremen at the Port of Busan, convinced 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 CONEXes (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 Vietnam War the majority of supplies and materials were shipped with the CONEX. After the U.S. Department of Defense standardized an 8′×8′ 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 largely displaced wooden containers in the 1950s. The railways of the USSR had their own small containers.
Purpose-built ships
Containers waiting at the South Korean port of Busan.
The first vessels purpose-built to carry containers began operation in Denmark in 1951. In the U.S. ships began carrying containers between Seattle and Alaska in 1951. The world’s first 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 April 26, 1956, when trucking entrepreneur McLean put 58 containers aboard a refitted tanker ship, the Ideal-X, and sailed them from Newark to Houston.[7] 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.[8][9] (See also pantechnicon van and trolley and lift van.)
Towards standards
During its first 20 years, many container sizes and corner fittings were used; 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 (International Organization for Standardization) recommendations standardized containerization globally[10]
- 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, containerization and other advances in shipping were impeded by the Interstate Commerce Commission, 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 United States’ present fully integrated systems 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-stack rail transport, where containers are stacked two high on railway cars was introduced in 1984 and first user was in the United States.
Today
A converted container used as an office at a building site
Today, approximately 90% of non-bulk cargo worldwide moves by containers stacked on transport ships; 26% of all container transhipment happens in China. For example in 2009 there were 105,976,701 transhipments in China (both international and coastal), and 21,040,096 happening in Hong Kong (which is listed separately), and only 34,299,572 in the United States. 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 (1,540 ft) in length and 60 m (200 ft) wide.[9]
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 its industrial goods 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 a more direct influence on the choice of producers and increase the total volume of trade.[9]
The widespread use of ISO standard containers has driven modifications in other freight-moving standards, gradually forcing removable truck bodies or swap bodies into 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. Some containers are outfitted with electronic monitoring devices and can be remotely monitored for changes in air pressure, which happens when the doors are opened. 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 8 1⁄2 in) gauge track known as standard gauge but many countries (such as Russia, India, Finland, and Lithuania) 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.
Containers have become a popular way to ship private cars and other vehicles overseas using 20 or 40ft containers. Unlike roll-on/roll-off vehicle shipping, personal effects can be loaded into the container with the vehicle, allowing for easy international relocation.
Container standards
ISO standard
There are five common standard lengths, 20-ft (6.1 m), 40-ft (12.2 m), 45-ft (13.7 m), 48-ft (14.6 m), and 53-ft (16.2 m). United States domestic standard containers are generally 48 ft (15 m) and 53-ft (rail and truck). Container capacity is often expressed in twenty-foot equivalent units (TEU, or sometimes teu). An equivalent unit is a measure of containerized cargo capacity equal to one standard 20 ft (length) × 8 ft (width) container. As this is an approximate measure, the height of the box is not considered, for instance the 9 ft 6 in (2.9 m) High cube and the 4-ft 3-in (1.3 m) half height 20 ft (6.1 m) containers are also called one TEU.
The maximum gross mass for a 20 ft (6.1 m) dry cargo container is 24,000 kg, and for a 40-ft (including the 2.87 m (9 ft 6 in) high cube container), it is 30,480 kg. Allowing for the tare mass of the container, the maximum payload mass is therefore reduced to approximately 22,000 kg for 20 ft (6.1 m), and 27,000 kg for 40 ft (12 m) containers.
The original choice of 8 foot height for ISO containers was made in part to suit a large proportion of railway tunnels, though some had to be modified. With the arrival of even taller containers, further enlargement is proving necessary
Air freight containers
A number of LD-designation Unit Load Device containers
While major airlines use containers that are custom designed for their aircraft and associated ground handling equipment the IATA has created a set of standard aluminium container sizes of up to 11.52 m3 (407 cu ft) in volume.
Other container system standards
Some other container systems are:
- PODS
- Haus-zu-Haus (House to house) (Germany)
- RACE (Australia)
- SECU (Sweden, Finland, UK)
- ARKAS
- Japanese railway containers (Japanese) Containers used by Japan Freight Railway Company