Seascapes - Container shipping - logistic liners

Containers are the most obvious elements of international shipping; they are seen everywhere; trundling along the motorway, in the factory loading bay and stacked on specialist trains. But containers were the units which became the common factor in a revolution which spread across the world of cargo liner shipping in the 1960s and 1970s and totally changed the face of the maritime industry.

Containerships were technology's answer to the problem of long stays in port as cargo - packed in bales, barrels, crates, boxes and loose, was slowly loaded and unloaded in lower holds and tweendecks using gangs of dozens of dockers. It was not uncommon for a typical 15,000 ton cargo liner to spend 170 days each year in port and a ship in the Australasian trades could spend two months on the coast, after a month's voyage from Europe. This was inefficiency which encouraged innovation. The container revolution effectively abolished all the expensive and time-consuming handling that was done to goods, in and out of lorries, trains and warehouses. Loaded into a 20 ft. or 40 ft. container at the point of origin and sealed, the goods will not be seen again until they are delivered to their final destination. To handle the containers and speed them on their way, a whole logistic system has been developed from specialist road and rail transport, ground handling equipment, like straddle carriers and huge gantry cranes in the port terminals. And of course, the remarkable ships themselves.

The biggest deep sea ships today are able to carry nearly a staggering 7,000 twenty foot equivalent units (the TEU being a universal measurement of containerisation), slotted into racks in the holds of the ship and stacked up to five high on deck. The ships themselves are fast, 25 knots not being unusual, but most importantly, they are far more precise and hugely more productive than their conventional predecessors. They will typically sail on a set hour on the same day of a week, often meeting trains which will on-carry the containers, so that consignees miles inland will be able to depend upon same-day delivery in a way that has never been possible before. This reliability makes it possible for manufacturers or retailers to greatly reduce the amount of stocks they are forced to carry, which saves substantial sums.

Large container ships tend to minimise their port calls, restricting them to "hub" ports along their route, the containers being distributed to other regional ports by smaller feeder ships. A single shore gantry crane can handle from 20-30 lifts per hour, so port calls are generally measured in hours rather than days.

Container shipping is a high technology, capital intensive operation, with heavy reliance on IT; computers being used to plan the stowage, to minimise handling of containers. The most modern container terminals now use a high degree of automation for movement of boxes from the shore container stack to the ship's side. Recent years have seen containership sizes react to scale economies, with the "1st generation" ships of 1,200 TEU having now grown to an average in excess of 5,000 TEU on the deep sea trades. Giants of 10,000 TEU plus are now being planned.

By BIMCO