B&I Line and CIE Containers

[JohnMartin90125]

For a few years now, I have been looking for pictures online of containers with B&I Line (I remember seeing loads of blue with a number of white ones around Brocklebank Dock) and orange CIE ones, without much luck. Saw a site which had transfers for them, can't remember who they were now but to me, they didn't look right so any information and pictures would be great so I can recreate them either as stand alone containers or as a backdrop.

 

Thanks folks.

 

JM

[Jim Martin]

There are some photos in various issues of Jane's Freight Containers. They're black and white, small and some are not well-reproduced, but I'll see what I can do tomorrow. There was a shot of a 20-foot hopper container which illustrated the CIE entry for several years in the 1970s

 

Jim

[Jim Martin]

I haven't had a chance to photograph any of the pages (I don't have a scanner), but what I've been able to find breaks down like this:

 

A 20' hopper container; the upper half is similar to an open-top container (like the Cawoods coal containers, I suppose) but the lower half is simply a frame which contains the hopper section itself. This picture appeared in the CIE section of the book in several editions through the 1970s

 

A 20' dry box mounted on a 4-wheel wagon. Looks like an ISO box (right sort of proportions, corner castings). Side door in the centre of the visible side, like a traditional 4-wheel van. No door in the visible end. This photo appeared in the CIE section in the 1980s.

 

A pair of 10' dry boxes loaded on a 4-wheel wagon. They are branded "CIE Uniload" and look to be ISO boxes. Looks like the doors must be at the ends, but not actually visible in the photo, which appeared in several 1980s editions.

 

A 20' tank container lettered with the CIE logo (as are all the above) and "ACRYLONITRILE", mounted on a 4-wheel wagon. This appears in some mid-80s editions.

 

In the section on container manufacturers there is a builder called Containers and Pressure Vessels Ltd. of Clones. Their entry includes a top view of a tank container with a very similar architecture to the CIE tank-tainer (mid-70s) and in some 1980s editions a low-angle shot of a tank container which looks to be the same type as the CIE one (it carries the same lettering)

 

There are a couple of shots of CIE container trains which look to be made up of 20' dry boxes, but there isn't really any visible detail in them. I'll see about posting them tomorrow.

 

Jim

[Jim Martin]

Well, I finally got my act together! Here are the pictures that I could find from various Jane's from the early 70s to the mid-80s. Bear in mind that these are considerably larger than they appear in the yearbooks and that the originals weren't always printed in brilliant clarity:

 

20-foot hopper container: this appeared in the book from 1973, if not before, and was still in the 1980 edition. It has gone from the CIE entry by the mid-80s

 

 

20-foot dry box: appeared in 1980s editions of the book.

 

 

20-foot dry boxes: similar in layout to the previous one, but the design of the container looks older, with its square corrugations. This photo was in a few mid-70s editions

 

 

10-foot dry boxes: this photo was in several editions in the 1980s

 

 

20-foot tank container: the top photo was in some mid-80s editions. The lower one appeared in the entry for Containers & Pressure Vessels Ltd in 1980 and was still in the 1986 edition (but printed much smaller)

 

 

 

B&I container train: this is self-explanatory. The photo appears in the CIE entry in the 1973-4 and 1974-5 editions. There's no more information than that in the caption, I'm afraid. The lower picture is a blow-up of the first container, which shows some bits of the B&I Line livery. 

 

 

 

I hope that some of this is useful.

 

Jim

[Jim Martin]

Honestly, I don't have any recollection of ever seeing any of these in the flesh; although I've lived in Liverpool since the early 80s, so I might have seen some of the B&I boxes in the past.

 

One thing I sometimes wonder about is the possibility that yearbook photos like these might tend towards showing new and sparkly equipment that the owners might want to highlight but which might not actually be all that typical. Take the hopper container, for instance: there are at least four in the photo, but maybe that's the entire fleet. There's no way to be sure.

 

That train photo is unlike anything I've ever seen. I assume that the hopper wagons are there to distribute the weight of the train, but I'd love to know why it was necessary.

 

Jim

[Fat Controller]

In the case of the hopper wagon, at least, I suspect the idea was to exchange vehicle bodies according to the traffic offered, rather than lifting the bodies on/off the train at either end of every journey. Such a container would be impractical for trailer-mounted unloading,  as the hopper doors would foul the centre members of the trailer chassis, and the centre of gravity would be very high; also, by this time, skeletal trailers with tipping gear were widely available. I suspect the idea was to squeeze as much use as possible out of costly wagon chassis, and store just the bodies off-season.

I've seen dry-goods and ventilated containers with side (as well as end) doors as late as the early 1990s; SNCF's container subsidiary, CNC, used to operate to operate them. Usually, they were to be seen only within France, but there was a regular traffic in them between Orleans and Melton Mowbray; sadly, the UK portion of the journey was by road.