Many railway firms were employing similar containers in the early 20th century. The Railway Clearing House opted to standardise the RCH container in the 1920s. Five or ten feet long, wooden and non-stackable, the early ‘UK-specific standard containers’ received a great response.

Meanwhile, Seatrain Lines started carrying railroad boxcars in 1929 – on its sea vessels to transport goods between Cuba and New York. From 1926 to roughly around 1947, the then famed Chicago North Shore and Milwaukee Railway carried shippers’ vehicles and motor carrier vehicles loaded on flatcars between destinations like Milwaukee, Wisconsin, Chicago and Illinois.

The evolution of the container industry has witnessed many such important milestones. In fact, the standardisation process of shipping containers worldwide remains one of the most significant and important developments in the logistics industry. The container handling equipment has also become more sophisticated.

These ships started off by transporting containers between Alaska and Seattle back in 1951 and four years later, the first intermodal container system employed the grand ship “Clifford J Rogers”. The maiden trip transported six hundred containers from British Columbia to Alaska. On reaching their destination, the containers were all removed from the ship and were transported to Yukon via railroad cars.

The American shipping container industry also began in the 1950s and owes much to the exploits of Malcolm McLean. He transported fifty eight containers from Newark to Houston in a renovated taker ship back in 1956. The idea of employing large containers which were not entered during transportation, and transferred on an intermodal basis with ships, truck and railroad cars was an innovative one at that time.

It is thought that McLean preferred the building of “trailerships” at first – these would transport trailers from large lorries and stow them within the cargo hold of the ship. This stowage method, known as “roll on / roll off” was rejected however, due to the fact that there would be a great amount of waste in available cargo space – known as “broken stowage”. As an alternative, McLean amended is original idea to loading the containers on to the ship but not the chassis.

The Chicago Great Western Railway & then the New Haven Railroad started a ‘piggy-back’ service (transportation of highway freight trailers on flatcars) in the mid-1930s. It was restricted to their own railroads. By 1953, the Chicago and Eastern Illinois, the CB&Q, and the Southern Pacific railroads had become part of the container industry innovation.

Once the U.S. Dept. of Defense chose to standardise an 8′x8′ cross section container in multiples of 10′ lengths for military usage, it was rather rapidly adopted for shipping purposes. These standards were adopted in the UK for containers and soon displaced the older wooden containers in the 1950s.

The first vessels purpose-built for carrying containers started operation in Denmark in 1951. Ships started carrying containers between Alaska and Seattle in 1951.

• Phase 1: Invention and development of containers in the US in the 1950s
• Phase 2:the containerisation of global trade that effectively occurred in the 1970s
• Phase 3: The growth in scale of container usage with gradual globalisation as well as the export-oriented industrialisation of developed/developing countries in the 1990s & beyond.

The idea of some kind of ‘inter-modal’ transport system – so that a transport unit could be utilised for carrying goods on various forms of carrier – can be said to have emerged from the US railroads. This was in the 1950s, as mentioned above.

Motor vehicles had been carried in the Midwest of the USA on flatcars. More regularly and increasingly these flatcar services were utilised to ‘piggy-back’ freight trailers on railways. This trend occurred during the same period as some shipping lines were engaged in experimentation with containers, such as the ones moving between Seattle & Alaska.
In 1956, Malcolm McLean happened to sail a ship from Newark to Houston – with over 50 containers. This was on a converted tanker ship. The idea of goods – moving from one form of transport to another one – without the container being opened was indeed novel. It quickly caught on and soon revolutionised world trade.