04-12-2010, 11:18 AM
I'm going to try to present what I heard of the history of Sea-Land Service from fellow employees when I worked for them in the early 1980's. Malcolm Mclain was the commander of the "Red Ball Express" in Europe during WW2. His job was to command supply trucks to keep up with General Patton during the war making sure the his tank corp never ran out of supplies. After the war, I understand that he used his wartime experience to start Roadway Express. I think it was sometime between 1948 and 1950 that he got the idea for shipping cargo in trailers on ships in intermodal service as we know it today. At the time he bought some surplus "Liberty" ships and started loading them with freight in trailers. That was the start of Sea-Land Service. Sometime after the start of Sea Land, the government stepped in and told him that owning both a trucking company and a shipping company constituted a monopoly, so he was forced to divest of one or the other company. He sold Roadway and developed Sea Land. He started loading trailers on ships, and then got the idea of a container that could be detached from a chassis and stacked like boxes in a ship's hold, and thus began the modern concept of intermodal service as we know it. I'm not clear on the the chronology of the development of containers and the divestiture of Roadway.
The point is that during the transition era, containerization would have been in it's infancy, probably Sea Land was the only true intermodal operator in international trade. Like most new ideas, the rest of the shipping industry waited to see if Sea Land would work before they made the investment to switch over.
I know nothing about the iron ore shipping in the Great Lakes region, so I can''t say when they started to dump iron ore directly into ships from trains.
It was while I was working for Sea Land that the first stack trains were introduced. It was also at that time, although I don't remember if it was during the 2 years I worked for Sea Land or the following 10 years that I worked for Overseas Shipping Terminal that ITS became the first terminal company in the Long Beach/Los Angeles Harbors to put tracks directly into the terminal to load trains from ships. When ITS started to load trains directly from the ship, the train did not go to the waterfront side of the terminal. Rather the tracks were on the other side of the terminal and the trucks and "bomb cats" would go under the "hammer head" crane, be loaded, and then drive across the terminal to a "transtainer" to have the container loaded onto the train. I think that is the same method used today in the harbor, at least on the West Coast. The railroad drops a cut of cars at the yard on the terminal just before the ship is due in. The containers to go on the train are transferred by truck from the ship to the cars, and if there are containers to go from the train to the ship, those containers transferred from the train to the terminal to be later loaded onto the ship.
The point of all of this is that during the transition era, virtually all of the international shipping would be break bulk. Most shipping terminals would have a crane that unloaded ships with cargo nets. Long shoremen aboard ship would load up the cargo nets, and then other long shoremen on the dock would transfer the cargo from the nets to carts to transfer the cargo into the shore side warehouse. There would be a loading dock with railroad tracks alongside the off shore side of the warehouse, and trucks or boxcars would be loaded by hand or forklift from the warehouse to the trucks or boxcars.
When I first went to work for Overseas Shipping Terminal, they had a slip on one end of the terminal with a warehouse next to the slip. There was an unusual crane that had the front track close to the waterfront. The rear rail for the crane was actually above the roof of the warehouse, and there was room for a truck to drive next to the warehouse on the dock between the warehouse and the ship. We handled small combination ships at the slip where they would have a dozen or two dozen containers on deck and break bulk like lumber or steel loaded below deck in the hold.
This post has gotten kind of long, but I hope it will help you figure out what your waterfront should look like in the era that you are modeling.
The point is that during the transition era, containerization would have been in it's infancy, probably Sea Land was the only true intermodal operator in international trade. Like most new ideas, the rest of the shipping industry waited to see if Sea Land would work before they made the investment to switch over.
I know nothing about the iron ore shipping in the Great Lakes region, so I can''t say when they started to dump iron ore directly into ships from trains.
It was while I was working for Sea Land that the first stack trains were introduced. It was also at that time, although I don't remember if it was during the 2 years I worked for Sea Land or the following 10 years that I worked for Overseas Shipping Terminal that ITS became the first terminal company in the Long Beach/Los Angeles Harbors to put tracks directly into the terminal to load trains from ships. When ITS started to load trains directly from the ship, the train did not go to the waterfront side of the terminal. Rather the tracks were on the other side of the terminal and the trucks and "bomb cats" would go under the "hammer head" crane, be loaded, and then drive across the terminal to a "transtainer" to have the container loaded onto the train. I think that is the same method used today in the harbor, at least on the West Coast. The railroad drops a cut of cars at the yard on the terminal just before the ship is due in. The containers to go on the train are transferred by truck from the ship to the cars, and if there are containers to go from the train to the ship, those containers transferred from the train to the terminal to be later loaded onto the ship.
The point of all of this is that during the transition era, virtually all of the international shipping would be break bulk. Most shipping terminals would have a crane that unloaded ships with cargo nets. Long shoremen aboard ship would load up the cargo nets, and then other long shoremen on the dock would transfer the cargo from the nets to carts to transfer the cargo into the shore side warehouse. There would be a loading dock with railroad tracks alongside the off shore side of the warehouse, and trucks or boxcars would be loaded by hand or forklift from the warehouse to the trucks or boxcars.
When I first went to work for Overseas Shipping Terminal, they had a slip on one end of the terminal with a warehouse next to the slip. There was an unusual crane that had the front track close to the waterfront. The rear rail for the crane was actually above the roof of the warehouse, and there was room for a truck to drive next to the warehouse on the dock between the warehouse and the ship. We handled small combination ships at the slip where they would have a dozen or two dozen containers on deck and break bulk like lumber or steel loaded below deck in the hold.
This post has gotten kind of long, but I hope it will help you figure out what your waterfront should look like in the era that you are modeling.