What is primarily shipped in intermodal containers? Are there any differences between the types of products that are shipped in domestic and foreign (international) containers? You see intermodal everywhere and it makes me wonder what’s in all those containers, train after train.
International containers hauled by rail are dominated eastward by consumer goods (clothing, electronics, shoes, kitchenware, bath and bed linens, sporting goods, toys), food (including frozen food), beer, wine, and liquor, auto parts (including tires), and furniture. Westward international containers hauled by rail do not run anywhere close to 100% loaded, but significant loads they will have are electronic equipment, auto parts, machinery, machinery parts, scrap paper, food, frozen meat, and finished paper.
Domestic containers hauled by rail are more balanced for loads east-west, and haul everything you see in an international container, but are more biased toward food (dry and canned), frozen meat, beer, wine, and liquor, panelboard, dry bagged non-hazardous bulk commodities, and finished and scrap paper.
Some dimensional lumber moves in containers off the Pacific Coast wharves because large numbers of containers are going offshore empty, but it’s not a major commodity inland by container.
S. Hadid
How do they send frozen food in a container?
In a refrigerated container. There’s a lot of them, both with diesel-powered package refrigerator units attached, and those that plug into shipboard power. Large quantities of frozen meat are crossdocked from containers into reefers (the kind on steel wheels) on the West Coast.
S. Hadid
In a refridgerated container on the ship, not on the train-right?
Refrigerated containers move by both ship and train. As well, refrigerated containers crossdock to reefers (steel wheel) eastward, and reefers crossdock to refrigerated containers westward. All refrigerated containers that I’m aware of moving by rail are self-contained. There’s been some one-off services historically that provided COFC cars with power plug-ins and a power car on the head end to provide the juice to refrigerated containers, but since these were largely dependent upon one customer in each lane, and customers tend to come and go, that has never caught on as a universal service in North America.
S. Hadid
CP has a fair number of gensets for plug-in reefers. They have a framework like a 20ft. Tanktainer, and occupy one 20ft space on a three well set with cables to plug-in reefers occupying the remaining spots on a three well set. It lifts out just like any other 20footer, its modular not built in.
I’ve seen container loads of used shoes, kalamata olives, hides, Christmas ornaments, all sorts of weird stuff. Once I outgated a truck and on the receipt it said it contained 480 pairs of girls. I assume it was 480 pairs of girls’ shoes or some such thing but it still cracked me up. Or maybe it was one of those new containers with shackles…
Shows that there’s always an exception to the rule somewhere.
S. Hadid
Used to be that you had to go to some tourist hot spot like Gatlinburg, Tennessee and there you would find all the stuff shipped in ocean containers. What’s in them now? Just look inside any store.
I will occasionally see Dole containers sitting on a chassis that has a generator mounted on the underside on flatcars. You can see the power cable hung from the container going from the generator to the refrigeration unit.
A BETTER question would be what is NOT shipped in containers 
Since we in the U.S. or buying just about everything from off-shore, you would be hard pressed to find anything that doesn’t come in one -
belonging to thoroughly modern white slavers taking advantage of new technology.