The early 20th century witnessed the adoption of closed type container boxes designed for movement between rail and road. Railroads on several continents by the 1830s were already carrying containers, which could be transferred to ships or trucks. These early containers were far smaller by today’s standards.

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.

This entry was posted on Friday, March 28th, 2008 at 6:09 am and is filed under Containers History. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.