I was reading that the White Pass and Yukon Route was the first railway to build custom designed railcars to move containers. When did the rest of North American railways start taking moving containers seriously? Does container traffic make up for a lot the majority of what trains haul?
It is easy to see whay Alaska would be the first with this. They have no outside connection to the rail world and so everything arrives by ship, and that is what ships use.
As ships used more and more containers, it became necessary for rail to carry the containers. Now if I order a container full of beanie babies from China, they will ship it directly to Richardton, and it will ride on a single bill of lading. The railroad is simply delivering a box.
Railroads stopped serving small towns all across the world, the box goes to the nearest terminal and a truck brings it the rest of the way. Truck-Ship-Train-Truck… it is all one. And the railroad suffers no drayage of their rail cars.
Does it cover a majority of traffic? Not hardly. My guess is Unit Coal Trains take that crow, least they do here on our line. Followed by grain and oil. AMTK and COFC and TOFC run on the Minot track which is faster.
But I’ll let a railroader give you the rest of the story.
ROAR
When American President’s Lines went to the UP in the early 1980s and said, “have we got a deal for you!” and told them they wanted to run containers stacked two high from LA to Chicago.
They had been the first to grasp the economic potential of double-stacking. It’s been full-speed-ahead since then. Now, at least 3/4 of the intermodal traffic is in containers and intermodal is about 1/4 of all rail traffic.
The White Pass was decades behind the leaders in building custom designed railcars to move containers. As to when the North American railways started taking moving containers seriously… Well, just let me say THIS about THAT…
But first, some current statistics. These are the US rail loadings for the first 38 weeks of 2012. They are from the Association of American Railroads.
| Total Non-Intermodal Loaded | 10,747,162 | 54.6% |
|---|---|---|
| Containers Loaded | 7,819,864 | 39.7% |
| Trailers Loaded | 1,129,800 | 5.7% |
| Total Intermodal Loaded | 8,949,664 | 45.4% |
| All Loading | 19,696,826 | 100.0% |
Grey if I could like your post, I would give two thumbs up.
That is not correct.
PRR experimented with container- on- flatcar LCL service in the 1920’s.
I have read that Pennsy wanted to develop this service throughout their routes but the ICC decreed that it was an unfair encrochement on the trucking industry…
In Germany they were loading wagons on to flatcars in the 1820s and the LIRR was hauling wagons on flats in the 1880s. I’m just about positive that I 've seen photos of wagons loaded with military equipment on flats during the Civil War.
IIRC the White Pass containers were 25 foot containers, presumably to fit existing 30’ NG flat cars. Their ship was built specifically for this size container. I guess the trouble with being early is they became obsolete when the world adopted the modern 20’ and 40’ containers. I always wonder what would have happened if they had developed 40’ NG cars for containers. Now there is a highway parallel to the line.
We need to remember that hearing examiners, administrative law judges, etc. are not members of the judiciary and must base their administrative decision on the laws in effect at the time as enacted by Congress. They do not have the authority to contravene or void the law. I would like to know who protested the rate proposals in the first place, causing the hearings to be held, and why PRR or NYC (whoever proposed the rates) did not appeal this decision to Federal Court.
I would strongly recommend that you read David De Boer’s book “Piggyback & Containers”; a detailed history of railroad intermodal service in North America.
It goes into detail about the regulatory hurdles faced by COFC and TOFC pioneers like Pennsy and NYC.
While land-based containers existed earlier, and land-sea containers also came along eventually, I have seen a number of citations to the effect that “The world’s first truly intermodal container system used purpose-built container ship the Clifford J. Rodgers built in Montreal in 1955 and owned by the White Pass and Yukon Route.”
Early 1984, after both SP ansd ATSF turned down APL’s request for a discounted rate since APL was furnishing the cars, containers, and management of the sales force and consolidation of loads, etc., per David DeBoer’s book titled Piggyback and Containers (Golden West Books, 1992).
- Paul North.
I’m surprised that no one has mentioned Malcolm Mclean. While many attempts were made at intermodal service over decades, Mclean was the first one to develop a commercially successful system that is still in use today.
A summary is here:
http://www.joc.com/joc_inc/history/p15.html
Wikipedia is useful too:
On April 26, 1956, with 100 invited dignitaries on hand, one of the converted tankers, the SS Ideal-X"(informally dubbed the “SS Maxton” after McLean’s hometown in North Carolina), was loaded and sailed from the Port Newark-Elizabeth Marine Terminal, New Jersey, for the Port of Houston, Texas, carrying fifty eight 35-foot (11 m) containers, along with a regular load of liquid tank cargo. As the Ideal-X left the Port of Newark, Freddy Fields, a top official of the International Longshoremen’s Association, was asked what he thought of the newly-fitted container ship. Fields replied, “I’d like to sink that son of a bitch.”* McLean flew to Houston to be on hand when the ship safely docked.[2]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malcom_McLean
*(Hmm, the forum software has redacted the actual word and substituted “son of a female dog” in its place. Read the Wikipedia link if you can’t figure it out. Can you imagine an angry Longshoreman using the phrase “son of a female dog”? He’d be laughed out of office!)
Rader,
Thanks for the insightful Journal of Commerce article.
Today we see trains of containers running across our country but there are a lot of containers we don’t see. They are the ones being transported by coastwise shipping. In the 1960’s Alfred Perlman testified before the ICC. He pointed out that in the 1950’s the government built and paid for St. Lawrence Seaway enabled ocean going ships to reach Great Lakes ports. These coastwise vessels now competed with the New York Central Railroad but of course the railroad did not receive the government support that the shipping industry did. I assume there was some kind of fee to use the seaway but Pearlman clearly believed his railroad and other railroads were big losers when the government decided to build the seaway. When the containers were off loaded government regulations and new highways favored the use of trucks to haul the freight. Perlman believed this was an important factor that lead to the bankruptcy of the New York Central Railroad.
Today things may have evened up, at least somewhat. Coastal vessels still go to Chicago and trucks still pull containers but railroads pull trains of containers too and seem to be doing well. The Staggers Act allowed railroads to do what they have always been able to do well: Haul freight. But even today we have a reduced rail system because of government support of trucks and ships.
You’re right. The hearing examiner, Harry C. Ames, did not have the authority to contravene or void the law. He did, however, have the authority to interpret the facts and the law as they interacted with each other. That’s what he got drastically wrong.
The superficial disastrous structure was that the “Attorney-Examiner” was not subject to any real review. The commissioners didn’t have time to delve into much detail - so they really just went along with the examiners’ recommendations. This is the specific cause of allowing one misguided government employed individual, Harry C. Ames, to greatly harm the US economy. The transportation world had changed forcefully and forever with the advent of motor transporation. And ole Harry C. just didn’t understand that.
The underlying, and more important, disastrous structure was the law that put ole Harry C. in a position to block innovation driven efficiency. Even if he’d had an effective review structure there’s no reason to believe that the commissioners would have understood the implications of motor transport any better than Harry C. did. These guys were political appointees with no required knowledge of transporation or commerce. And even it they had had such knowledge they couldn’t see the future. They couldn’t “uninvent” the motor truck and they certainly couldn’t forsee its implic
I’ll trust Grey on the ICC details. But I will ask a clarifying question… are we talking about who started using over-sized rectangular boxes as containers in what we now call intermodal … or the first time in history anyone put a sealed, detachable freight container on a flat car? Which “first” you choose determines whether you are looking at J.B. Hunt, D&H/Erie Piggyback service, or even TripleCrown/RoadRailer. Thoughts?
I taught public administration for nearly thirty years. It certainly does appear that Harry C. Ames made a major mistake in his analysis. But, the real mistake was made by the ICC. No human is perfect. When Congress established the ICC and the agency infrastructure, it expected the ICC to do the job that was assigned to them, that is, review the recommendations by examiners. Nowhere in the law will you find that the attorney-examiner’s recommendation is to be rubber stamped. Yes, opponents have the burden of proof, but the ICC really is the guilty party here. Note - I am not related to Mr. Ames, never heard of him previously. The ICC, according to your narrative, said it didn’t have time to do its job. I wonder how many of us could get away with that excuse for simply passing along someone else’s recommendation. Mr. Ames made a mistake. He did his job, but he made a mistake, just like most of us do. The ICC was negligent, it didn’t do its job, but pleaded overwork. You and I know from experience that there are ways to deal with overflowing inboxes - prioritization is just one. Taking more time to examine the recommendations and make a decision is another, even if it meant issuing continuances. I agree that the decision was a bad one. I hold Mr. Ames at fault, I blame the ICC.
I would say none of the above. It’s more than the equipment. Reductio ad absurdum, a barrel is a sealed, detachable freight container. But placing one in or on a railcar does not create a containerized intermodal transportation system. You can put about anything on a flatcar. But doing so doesn’t necessarily create anything more than another carload in an inefficient loose car rail system.
I’ve been interested in this since 1975. (Then a grad student at Northwestern writing a thesis on "The Transportation of LCL/LTL Freight By Railroad. A real page turner.)
The honor for “First to Figure Out the Future” goes to the New York Central under its president Alfred Holland Smith. Their breakthrough innovations continued well after Smith’s death in 1924. (He died from being thrown off a horse in New York’s Central Park.)
Check out the short, somewhat awkward, last paragraph in this New York Times article:
http://query.nytimes.com/mem/archive-free/pdf?res=FB071FFD395D14738DDDA10894D9405B828EF1D3
“The idea of President Smith of the New York Central seems to be co-ordinate with motor truck with the railroads.”
A co-ordinated system using trains and trucks each to their best advantage to produc
No.
The burden of proof wasn’t on the opponents. It was on the railroads. The 1910 Mann-Elkins Act put the burden of proving that their rates were “Just and Reasonable” on the railroads. Now just how do you “Prove” that the price you are charging is “Just and Reasonable”? Well, in an industry with high fixed costs, costs shared by many diverse types of business with different elasticities, such as a railroad, you cannot.
I’ll reiterate my