The volume of container traffic from the west coast headed east is amazing. When those containers reach their destinations and are unloaded are they sent back to the supplier?
Do the railroads run the empties (containers) back to their ports of origin? Seems the trans-shipping facilities to return the empties would need as much room at the ports as the off loading areas as when they first arrive loaded.
Anyone know how the empties (containers) are returned for re-use? What about empty trucks from pigs(TOFC)? Same deal?
Seems like a train of empty containers wouldn’t be all that profitable for the railroad.
The railroads try to avoid doing this but sometimes the amount of empty containers gets lopsidded it becomes necessary to do this , in most cases the shippers will pay for the movement back to the point of origin .
The other thing you must consider is that each terminal keeps a supply on hand of empty containers from each supplier for anything that may needed to be shipped back over seas .
The various grain exporting associations have been studying utilizing the containers to send grain to the asian countries. I believe Taiwan receives much of their grain in bags, loaded in containers.
Increasingly, the containers they haul on to ships leaving Britain are empty. The imbalance between imports and exports means that a container arriving full of goods from China has a 75% chance of leaving with nothing inside. Shipping empty containers offends the industry’s obsession with efficiency, and operators will accept almost any payment to transport items in the unpopular, China-bound direction. As a consequence, many of the containers leaving Britain that are not empty are full of waste materials, shipped to China for recycling, where they have been blamed for exacerbating disease and pollution. (That the ships involved emit their own polluting emissions from dirty marine fuel - albeit at a far less damaging rate than air transport - merely compounds the problem.)
Out west you’ll see UP repo a lot of empty trailer chassis around the region when there is an imbalance. I’ve seen entire trains of them, on flat spine cars and inside stack wells.
Last time I spoke to my BNSF contact, he indicated that the INTL container market has become a lot more balanced. Westbound, export products include grain, scrap paper and scrap metal. Coiled steel and rolled paper are also big.
Ag shippers like to use the INTL boxes for grain because they can sell their grain as “Identity Protected” given that they load it at their farm or transload, directly from their field and it doesn’t get co-mingled with grain from lots of others growers in an elevator, unit grain train or bulk freighter ship. That way if you grow a unique strain of grain, or organic or non-genetically altered, you can provide an assurance that you container(s) only contain that product. Adds value for the shipper.
The majority of the stack trains leaving LPCHI are grain trains ( containers loaded with grain at the many local elevators directly into containes ) and then shipped .
What timing…I came on here to post a similar question. Along the NS in Atlanta, I will see trains headed to Charleston, SC with 100+ loaded stack/flat cars. Then the opposite numbered train will come by with a few loads and about 80% empty stack/flat cars. I would think there would be a near equal load of traffic coming in from the port as well as going out; of course this particular train’s “mission” may be to get loads to the port and come back.
Thanks for the reference…I found it online in the local library catalog, and placed a reserve on it…they will e-mail me when it’s available. Thing to note, however: my first title search for “The Box” didnt find it, but a title search for “Shipping Container” found it right away. Go figure…
Go to wawg.org. Plenty of info and links, plus coverage of their Wheat Life magazine, which I’m proud to say my company prints. Containerized grain is one of the fastest-growing markets for boxed commodities exporting from our Northwest ports. Back when Camas Prairie RailNet was still running to Grangeville, Idaho, in 2000, there was at least one elevator loading directly in bulk (not sacked) into containers, which were then trucked to Lewiston/Port of Wilma for barge shipment down the Snake and Columbia rivers. In the years since then, containerization of Northwest grain headed for Asia has surged, in part because of convenience and control for the buyer (kinda like just-in-time delivery right to their door, in a handy metal dispenser), but also because the need for backhauled containers and the speed/fuel efficiency of container ships over bulk ships has made it more competitive.
Rail fans will be diasppointed that most of the book is about ships…there is one chapter and part of another in which the railroads figure prominently.
But I still thought it was an excellent book, which did a good job of tracing the evolution of the shipping container. If you are looking for lots of techincal information and drawings, however, this book is not what you are looking for. Excellent analysis of business, union, economics, and politics involved, however.
One thing I did not find suprising was that, similar to lots of other industries, it took an outsider to create significant change.
One thing I did not expect, was the way that containerization helped clean up the logistics nightmare in Viet Nam. The author seemed to imply that if it werent for the inprovement in logistics caused by containerization, the US might have been fed up and left even earlier…
The book makes a good case that the container, by reducing the amount of dockside labor required for loading and unloading break-bulk cargo, helped dramaticaly reduce the cost of transportation which helped fuel an increase in trade and economic growth, not just for the US but the whole world.
I was disapointed in that John G. Kneiling wasn’t mentioned, he was an early proponent of the use of containers for rail freight (e.g. the January 1968 issue of Trains). Also thought that a bit more could have been said about the early work on containerization done in Cincinnati.
A subtle point mentioned in the book was the invention of the quarter-turn lock used to fasten stacked containers.
And a subject that might be better in a separate thread - wonder how some of the narrow gauge lines fortunes would have changed had containers become common in the 1920’s?
Intreresting thought…are you thinking that trans-shipping would have been faster and cheaper by moving a box from flat to flat, instead of having stevedores manhandle the freight?
sounds like an interesting premise for a model layout!
It would have changed nothing. There was very little need for containers until the late 1950s as there was very little containerizable freight moving in the necessary volume, consistency, and distance prior to WWII. The technology found acceptance when the need appeared. Had the need appeared earlier, the technology would have appeared earlier. Containerization is not an especially novel or unusual technology, nor did it rest upon prerequisite scientific, engineering, and manufacturing technologies like the internal combustion engine and D.C. motor did. The innovation was only in the recognition of a need and putting together the organization, financing, and managerial persistence necessary to bring it to market.
“The New York Central is the pioneer of container service. It was first tried out between Cleveland, Ohio and Chicago, beginning March 19, 1921.” After that time, container traffic grew at the rate of 12% per year, then exploded 220% in 1928. By that year, not only the New York Central, but the Lehigh Valley, the Boston & Maine, and the Pennsylvania Railroad were offering container service, and out West, Missouri Pacific was planning to.
It was a rapidly expanding service, and becoming particularly popular with freight forwarders. It threatened to upset the whole industry.
"The invention of the container and the container car is comparable to the invention of a new type of freight car. … We do think … because of the merit inherent in the container itself, the promises which it holds for effective competition with transportation by truck, and the transportation economies which evidently can be developed with the more extensive use of the container, that the use of the c
Was the reason for not allowing special rates to protect the weak railroads, or was it because the big railroads also controlled the truck portion as well?
It was an interesting decision; well thought out, even if the decision itself was controversial, and certainly from today’s perspective even as the ICC opinion is recognizable in modern terms as a contemporary argument on the issue. It foresaw a “race to the bottom” in rates which the industry could not afford at the time, and was a difficult decision for the ICC because the ICC understood it was throttling an important development; one of the most important decisions the ICC ever made. If I get a chance, I will try and scan the decision tomorrow and post it – a very compelling and interesting discussion there, as the ICC saw, quite clearly, the impact that COFC/TOFC would have on rates and competition. The ICC warned that by abandoning the carefully structured rate system built around carload and specific goods/commodity rates in favor of a purely weight-based tariff represented by how much could be stuffed into a container, the industry risked a potentially fatal rate warfare.
The decision could have been written in 1971 with much the same analytical t
That gets back to one of my criticisms of Levinson’s book, that he didn’t say much about the early experiments with containers. As far as narrow gauge lines went, I’d guess (and strong emphasis on guess) that the useful lives of some narrow gauge lines could have been extended by a decade - though Durango to Alamosa probably would still have been abandoned b
The New Haven was the first railroad to use containers, beginning in 1847 and lasting to 1896. They were small – 160 cubic foot – but successfully competed for FAK service between New York and Boston water-rail via Stonington, and on other New Haven routes. The NYC service began in 1921 and was emulated in 1928 by the PRR; both services rendered uneconomical by ICC requirement that class rates be used instead of FAK rates. The NYC containers were 6x9x7.5’ in size, weighed 2,800 lbs light (which is very heavy considering a 20’ steamship box weighs 4,500 lbs.) and carried only 6,000 lbs. of lading. This containerization service began and operated in the most densely populated and industrialized section of the U.S., not in the thinly populated, unindustrialized Rocky Mountain West.
The question I have for you, just what were D&RGW customers supposed to ship in containers? The overwhelming preponderance of traffic on the narrow gauge from 1880 to 1950 was products of mines, forests, and fields: coal, ore concentrates, lumber, and livestock, none of which is conducive to shipping in an NYC-style container, which on tare weight alone would have exhausted one-fourth of the capacity of a standard 40,000 lb. capacity, 30 foot deck, narrow-gauge flatcar of the 1930s, nor even in a 4,500 lb. 20’ steamship container of the 1950s. (After 1950 drill stem, oilfield pipe,
Good point wrt D&RGW, but I was also thinking as much about such lines as the EBT (which was dependent on coal if I recall correctly). The EBT comes to mind from the use of the “Timber Transfer” used to mount standard gauge cars on narrow gauge wheelsets (with often painful results) - first read about that in the June 1967 issue of Model Railroader.
My understanding was that the final straw for the D&RGW was the loss of oil traffic from Chama to Alamosa.
Thanks for the background on the NH containers and the early NYC - PRR containers. I got to be pretty familiar with the construction of steamship boxes from a couple of projects at work.
3-4 years ago, a friend of mine in the container shipping industry told me that containers were being stockpiled and scrapped in NJ. One reason was that steel was much cheaper for the Chinese back then and the Chinese could build a new container for less money than to ship an empty container halfway around the world. They could fit (on average) 5.7 scrapped containers in a container and ship the scrapped steel back to China where they would make more containers (among other things) out of the scrapped steel. When one thinks about the labor involved it doesn’t sound economical. But now that the price of steel has risen sharply in the past few years, this practice almost non-existant.