Another archive item, from July '92 Trains: A 48-foot container built by Mid-America International, was used like a bulkhead flat, with bundles of lumber. The pic showed one in revenue service on a doublestack train (MLTA-3) on the UP in Fremont, NE. The container looks a bit like a bulkhead flat with some end bracing. It has no “roof”.
In the pic, the lumber had shifted a little and the tie-down straps had come loose.
I don’t recall ever seeing any containers like this in revenue service or anywhere else … evidently they never caught on? Other than standard “boxes”, I’ve seen some tanks in box frames but nothing else unusual on stack trains
They break easy. Containers need all the walls, floor and roof to retain structural integrity. Especially when it is time to be craned aboard the ship.
Ive had whole tree trunks shoved into domestic containers and they dont stand up to the abuse well.
Fortunatly there is a great industry that does nothing but scrap and rebuild abused and destroyed containers.
Now… there are FLATS that have very special end bulkheads and very strong deck designed to withstand a straight lift to and from the ship. Those are pretty special.
The entire reason for being for a container is that some factory in China or anywhere, loads it one time with widgets. Closes the doors and seals it. It is never opened again until the buyer gets it to the dock. that is the reason for the container’s existence.
The ones I’ve seen were for handling loads that were either inconvenient or impossible (too wide?) to handle in a closed container. The bulkheads weren’t there for the same reason as they are on flat cars–they’re just to provide height if another container is required to be stacked on top of this one. When not in use, the bulkheads collapse inward, and four or five of these things make up roughly the same volume as a standard box of the same length.
The original reason for these “things” was to kill re-load points and ship the whole thing on a pig. As stated above, great idea with bad unintended consequences.
It seems like on some, the ends fold down flat, so that they can be piled up for the return empty trip. Maybe around 6 of these folded units would take as much space as one container.
I can see how there would be problems with shipments such as these going onboard a ship. However, I could see this idea working for domestic service. It seems like the whole thing about containers is the ability to move on rail and on the back of a truck. I know that trans-loading does take time, and cost money, but I would think that containers like these, designed only to be stacked two high at most, on a railroad car, could be quite usefull. Let the advantage of truck and train be combined into one thing.
One problem I see, however, is how to make the “container” strong enough to carry a decent load, and be of decent strength, yet no be too heavy for road transport once it reaches its destination. I don’t know how much extra weight the container would add to the load, vs. transloading, where you’re using a normal truck that only has to carry the weight of the cargo, and not the container.
I’ve read that containers of this type are used quite a bit in the UK and Europe. They call them swapbodies over there. In North American service it seems that the inability to doublestack them (at least on the bottom of the well car) would be an issue.
I have an old copy of the John Kneiling book “Integral Train Systems” and one of the innovations he was promoting was use of similiar containers…
