Containerization/Container Shipping

Historical Development of Containerization

From the practical inception of for-hire trucking in the 1920s, railways began to carry straight trucks and semitrailers on flatcars between major railway terminals. Known colloquially as “piggy-back” or more formally as “trailer-on-flatcar” (TOFC) service in the United States and Canada, railway flatcars were modified with folding bridges so that vehicles could be driven from specialized loading docks over the length of the train. This cumbersome and laborious “circus-style” of train loading offset the fuel and labor cost savings of shipping individual trucks by rail over long distances. In the United States, piggy-back service faced serious obstacles from the Interstate Commerce Commission (ICC), which became responsible for interstate trucking in 1935, and the Teamsters, whose truck-driving jobs were at stake, also opposed the innovation. Thus piggy-back service did not really take off until the middle 1950s when the ICC relaxed its regulatory restrictions and railroad consortia such as Trailer Train in the United States were formed to rationalize piggy-back service on a number of competing railroads.

While there were a number of initiatives to reduce freight-handling costs and to containerize freight for different modes in different regions of the world, containerization in the United States was heavily influenced by the innovative spirit of one aggressive and innovative entrepreneur and former trucking company owner, Malcolm McLean. McLean was motivated to reduce the costs incurred in traditional break-bulk operations as freight was transferred from trucks to coastal shipping routes on the eastern seaboard. Traditional truck trailers were not ideal for this purpose because “fishy-back” wasted the volume between truck trailers and the deck that was required for the wheels. McLean's original goal was to design a shipping container for transshipment between trucks and World War II vintage T2 tankers that was inaugurated in 1956 in a test shipment over the coastal waters from Newark, New Jersey, to Houston, Texas. A variety of experiments with container shipping in the 1950s shared one common element: there was no consensus on whose standard container was to be used on a worldwide basis.

The negotiation of container standards pitted the American Standards Association (ASA) against the International Standards Organization (ISO), and within each of the two nongovernmental organizations there were competing enterprises that had already sunk considerable capital into containers that were incompatible.

By the early 1960s an American dimensional standard had emerged: 8 feet high, 8 feet wide, and 10, 20, 30, or 40 feet long, but 24-foot and 35-foot containers remained in service; in addition, a second series of smaller containers was also recognized, some measured in feet and others in meters. To realize their full potential, containers had to be stackable and secured with standard steel fittings welded to the corner post with fasteners so that any container could be locked to any other container. Most of the corner fittings were patented, and after a modified American Sea-Land design was finally adopted by the ISO as the world standard in 1965, it turned out that it would not withstand the stresses imposed by European freight-train couplings or high seas in a marine mode.

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