Intermodal

I greatly enjoyed Holding Pattern's imagery of airports and the cryptic beauty of ICAO markings, and was inspired to take a similar look at some of the world's busiest shipping terminals.

Before the age of intermodal transport, goods were manually loaded and unloaded from ships by legions of longshoremen, a costly and time-consuming process. The World Shipping Council offers a brief description of the invention of the shipping container:

"...in 1955, Malcom P. McLean, a trucking entrepreneur from North Carolina, USA, bought a steamship company with the idea of transporting entire truck trailers with their cargo still inside. He realized it would be much simpler and quicker to have one container that could be lifted from a vehicle directly on to a ship without first having to unload its contents.

His ideas were based on the theory that efficiency could be vastly improved through a system of "intermodalism", in which the same container, with the same cargo, can be transported with minimum interruption via different transport modes during its journey. Containers could be moved seamlessly between ships, trucks and trains. This would simplify the whole logistical process and, eventually, implementing this idea led to a revolution in cargo transportation and international trade over the next 50 years."

With a streamlined system for transporting goods via truck, rail, and ship, global commerce exploded in volume. Today, over 90% of the world's goods are shipped by container, accounting for trillions of dollars in trade.


Images & data:

[1] Images from Google Earth
[2] Caption data from Wikipedia - World's busiest container ports

Further reading:

[1] BBC - The invisible network that runs the world
[2] Wikipedia - Intermodal freight transport
[3] Wikipedia - Containerization
[4] Smithsonian - Giant ports stitch together the world economy (interactive)
[5] World Shipping Council - History of Containerization

Videos:

[1] Terminal: A short film about the mechanical ballet of cargo
[2] Travel by cargo boat from Hong Kong to Singapore
[3] Maersk Triple-E timelapse: Maiden call in Busan