book about history of the modern shipping container

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Finally got around to getting this book about history of the modern shipping container.
Procrastinated for so long it is now a new edition with an additional chapter!
Arrived several days ago.
Have read first several chapters and scattered bits throughout.

Looks like the change to standardized containerized shipping had a profound effect on both the structure of societies and the global economy.
As in it allowed there to be a global economy.

Yes... I just saw a great video on the rise of China, and US foreign policy. And...shipping containers, as an invention played a huge role in that. Funny how the invention of a dumb big box can influence global geopolitics. The guy who founded the Sea-land company in 1956 lamented how it takes so long to load and unload sea going ships, and thought of the idea of truck-trailer sized containers going on ships. And started to experiment with modifying ships for his containers. It took decades for his idea to really take hold in the merchant marine industry, but it was like the switch from sailing ships to steam- revolutionary.

Here in the UK a man called Dr Beeching was the man who influenced the decisions because he was the one who brought things into being on the railway side of things as prior to that the standard sizes used in the UK were a lot smaller as they were designed to be pulled on the back of a horse and cart (Later mechanical horses like the Scammell Scarab and others were used which were designed to almost turn back on themselves to fit and manoover the cart with a container in the tight spaces which a horse used to fit, which is why the little "Lorries" normally had 3 wheels as 4 wheel designs struggled to get into such tight spaces).

Dr Beeching insisted the whole of the railways along with the roads, ports and shipping had to be changed to accomodate these new containers and he did a lot to bring in these changes which brought us into todays modern world. Prior to that Britain had been a logistical nightmare as far as transporting goods were concerned as almost everything had to be individually manhandled on and off ships (With the help of cranes).

Didn't know about that aspect.
Have read where he influenced a lot of people in what seems to have been called "The Beeching cuts".

It had a huge impact on who made what where, and where they could economically send it to sell it.

Also turns out that global politics had an impact on container shipping in fuel costs for the container ships and therefore what kind of ships are designed and their cruising speeds and how big they are which then controls where they can go.

One instance, and I forget the original cause, the building of oil tankers fell off, so in order to stay in business and keep their skilled employees working, shipbuilders started offering big discounts on container ship construction.

The author shows how everything is entangled with everything else.

Oh, also in book it mentions how several RR's, notably NYC, New York Central, really resisted efforts to use containers partly because they had recently spent a bunch of money and effort on piggyback trains and facilities.

I remember commercials on the radio back in my Sixties childhood ... the sound of a dad playing piggyback with his little daughter...and the baritone announcer going "piggybacking... an idea as old as a father's love, is now being used by the Acme Railroad company. Blah, blah, blah..." Corny ad, but its sticks in your mind...even after half of a century.

Piggybacking was a similar, but different scheme. Special flatcars to carry a pair of truck trailers without the "tractor" (motor and driver) part. But they can be hooked up to a tractor when offloaded from the rails.



A good idea, but you can see how the more radical Sea-Land container concept is even more efficient in the long run.

Now that was ad success!
Wonder how much actual business it drew to the RR?

He was famous for being on the committee for transforming the railways so they could make a profit because prior to that the UK railways were in a mess both financially and otherwize. Though the cuts were hard hitting, had they not done anything, the whole railway system here would have collapsed.
People do not see the reality of the situation the British railways were in back then so while one missed many unprofitable branchlines and stations, unless something was done nothing would survive.
Part of the problem here in Britain was the unions because they were so strong, that the only way they had at the time to reduce costs was to cut whole stations and lines out, because there had been a situation where even a small branchline station could have six staff staffing it all on different types of duties, and when it was suggested that one staff member could do the lot, the unions would take the whole railway down in a strike. So they HAD to close some stations down completely as the only way to solve the issue and make the case that these stations were simply not profitable. If the unions saw sense these stations would have survived.
Many, many people lost their jobs due to this, and it was all because of the inflexibility of the unions to reach reasonable solutions to the debt that the railways were accumilating where rightfully so, the tax paying public of their day started to ask the questions of why they were footing the bill.

So in a way, Dr Beeching either broke the railways or saved the railways depending on how one saw it. I personally will say that the difficult decisions back then would have to be addressed anyway, but if the railways had been in private hands, I do believe there would have been more effort to try to make things work... BUT having said that, I believe that the effects of this effort would only have prolonged the same issues that they faced rather then solve them, as the railways were daily loosing more traffic then they gained.

The approach should have been more gentle so that it could allow more industries and people to adapt to the new ideas.
Example is those containers. Here it came in too quick and the big container depots were too far away, so most firms that used rail who had to adapt just ripped up their rail connections, as for them they had to now load their goods in the container and drive it to the large container depot many miles away, where they may as well just drive direct to their destination!
Had the new container depots been not just in the cities, but in the railway served towns too, the many industries would have been able to adapt, especially if they could have bought another invention which arrived too late... The large forked lif trucks designed to lift these containers at smaller depots... As back then everything was done by cranes often built into buildings, which were not large enough in many industries to cater for these new heavy containers.
So it would have worked far better if more time and more small scale container depots were made.

Y'all are dealing in a whole different scale of distances than we are,
(which is or at least should be obvious to even the most casual observer!)
but even so, same thing sometimes happens here.
I live not overly far from BNSF's Pacific Coast seaport to midwestern cities route, which is about the same length run as from Lisbon, Portugal, to Warsaw, Poland.

Which brings to mind that this might be enjoyable,


https://youtu.be/AAQUGsUzWbE

That's very fascinating and that's also a very thick book. There's lots of history crammed in those pages.

Basically its taking piggybacking one step further by removing the wheels from the trailer, and just using the 53 foot long cargo container part, as the thing that gets stacked onto flat cars, but also can be stacked....on (and inside of) sea going ships.

Every now and then containers fall off of ships crossing the ocean in storms. Sometimes the contents spill out. A container carrying nike shoes from china did that...and folks still find stray nikes in the kelp of the pacific northwest. A container of rubber duckies did the same thing. Folks still find rubber duckies on the beaches of California. But sometimes the container stays intact and drifts like a manmade iceberg in the ocean, and gets festooned with marine life, and becomes an ecosystem all to itself.