How are 20ft containers stacked on trains?

[TEAMYAKIMA]

First of all let me say that I do not model UK railways but I am seeking advice on how the UK does things as a clue to how the world does things.

 

I am currently permanently gluing two 2ft containers to a 40ft flat car and suddenly I thought, "Is there a right way and a wrong way to do this?"

 

Let me explain .................

 

Would they put the two containers on randomly? Which is my guess.

 

OR

 

Would they put the two 'door ends' facing inwards - for extra security?

 

OR

 

Would they have both the 'door ends' facing outwards - so that (customs) inspections could easily take place?

 

Thanks for any thoughts

Edited November 17, 2020 by TEAMYAKIMA

[woodenhead]

I don't think it would matter.

 

The container will be as secure as it has to be when it leaves where it is loaded, no container is on a train all it's journey, in fact I would hazard a guess that unless it is going across a continent then it will spend most of it's time on the back of a lorry, on a dock or within a ship.  Generally on the back of a lorry it faces backwards, but I presume that allows unloading of the container in situ upon the trailer.

 

For customs I reckon they are picked for checking as they leave the terminal if by road or as they they leave the ship - once in storage they may not necessarily be at a height where customs can access let alone the right direction.  They couldn't be scanned I wouldn't think without going through a scanner probably on the back of an internal carrier unit if heading off the terminal by means of rail.

Edited November 17, 2020 by woodenhead

[37114]

As Woodenhead says, they will be loaded in the way they come off the trailer, generally most yards would see the lorries arrive on the unloading pad from the same direction hence doors would be at the same end along the train. We used to run 2 x empty boxes on the same road trailer and they would generally be loaded doors to the rear as that is how they would come out of the stack and in essence it was default for the crane driver to load doors to the rear of the trailer for obvious reasons:

If we were bringing 2 lightly loaded 20fts back from the port to the yard they may be put doors to the centre if the driver had to night out on route but it needed to be requested.

 

We never had customs inspections once they left the port as the containers are sealed so any inspection would then happen at the customers site. The only time we had a box open in the yard was for fumigation purposes but it was rare.

[TEAMYAKIMA]

3 minutes ago, 37114 said:

As Woodenhead says, they will be loaded in the way they come off the trailer, generally most yards would see the lorries arrive on the unloading pad from the same direction hence doors would be at the same end along the train. We used to run 2 x empty boxes on the same road trailer and they would generally be loaded doors to the rear as that is how they would come out of the stack and in essence it was default for the crane driver to load doors to the rear of the trailer for obvious reasons:

 

Aha!  That's an option I didn't think of - both the same way round - excellent!

 

Many thanks to both of you

[TravisM]

Having transported more than a few containers when I had my HGV license, a 20ft was secured with twist locks and either on a “shorty” 20ft trailer or placed in the middle of a 40ft.  If the container was being delivered to somewhere were it was being unloaded, obviously the doors would be towards the rear but if it was going from distribution depot to another, it really wouldn’t matter which way it was facing.

[jonhall]

I've seen instructions to load door to door if the content was valuable, and occasionally if the route had known 'hijacking' problems (where trains stopped at signals have a tendency to attract opportunist thefts, and a lot of low floor wagons achieve this accidently because the buffing gear is in the way of the doors, but the UK doesn't tend to do 'on wagon' inspection or unloading, so making legitimate access easy isn't usually a consideration. 

 

The exception is the MOD containers that tend to have side doors, I seem to recall a pallet of missile launchers or some such being stolen (opportunistically) from a wagon stopped at a signal, which as you might imagine got investigated rather more thoroughly than other incidents.

 

Jon

[The Johnster]

During my time at Canton as a freight guard, the 70s, one of my link mates was robbed of an ingot of aluminium worth several 10s of thousands of pounds from the Stratford>Danygraig (Swansea) Freightliner, a job I  did regularly and never thought about security on.  The train habitually stood for several minutes waiting for the calling on signal to enter Danygraig terminal, and the rear of it would be in scrub and sand dunes in the area behind Danygraig steam shed and the Ford factory on Fabian Way.  The baddies had a large, container type, fork lift and the wagon was out of Dave's sight from the back cab around a bend; they simply unlocked the securing tabs and lifted the wagon off the train, nobody any the wiser for some time. 

 

Around the same time, a container loaded at Pengam (Cardiff, now moved to Marshfield) was rumoured to have gone AWOL somewhere on the North London line in transit from the Royal Mint at Llantrisant with £2 million of 50p pieces. or, as it's otherwise known, 4 million 50p pieces.  Some cockney miscreant must have had a very big gas meter...  If this theft really happened, and it is by no means unlikely that it did, it was never reported in the press.  It would have been a historically large and completely successful heist; the 1963 Great Train Robbery netted 'only' £800k more and Brinksmat was a decade into the future.  Everybody muttered stuff about 'insider jobs', but all that was needed would be an observer outside the mint 'spotting' the container to get in a car and drive down to Pengam, probably getting past the lorry on the way, and note the position of the container on the train, then phone the information to someone in the Smoke.

Edited November 17, 2020 by The Johnster
Stupid Johnster can't spell.

[lankyphil]

In my experience, the orientation depends on how the box has been presented to the train. If the train is loaded by a container handler, it's quite awkward to rotate even a 20, so they just get stuck on the train. Some wagons have a wedge fitted at the end, so even though it looks like the doors are facing outwards, the wedge (only and a foot high) physically stops the doors from being opened.

[daveyb]

14 hours ago, jonhall said:

I've seen instructions to load door to door if the content was valuable, and occasionally if the route had known 'hijacking' problems (where trains stopped at signals have a tendency to attract opportunist thefts, and a lot of low floor wagons achieve this accidently because the buffing gear is in the way of the doors, but the UK doesn't tend to do 'on wagon' inspection or unloading, so making legitimate access easy isn't usually a consideration. 

 

The exception is the MOD containers that tend to have side doors, I seem to recall a pallet of missile launchers or some such being stolen (opportunistically) from a wagon stopped at a signal, which as you might imagine got investigated rather more thoroughly than other incidents.

 

Jon

We always used to load 'doors inward' on standard end-door containers for explosives if we had a lifter... often not an option and often we used our own (RCTU or RLCU) full side openers, loaded while on flats. I'm not sure we even have MoD owned containers anymore

 

The incident you note above was a number of anti-tank mines that were stolen from a VKA when stopped at a signal near Arpley. It wasn't discovered until Didcot but we did get them all back in the end... I was on duty for that incident!

[F-UnitMad]

16 hours ago, jools1959 said:

Having transported more than a few containers when I had my HGV license, a 20ft was secured with twist locks and either on a “shorty” 20ft trailer or placed in the middle of a 40ft.  If the container was being delivered to somewhere were it was being unloaded, obviously the doors would be towards the rear but if it was going from distribution depot to another, it really wouldn’t matter which way it was facing.

One of the drivers where I worked brought back a 45ft box loaded with doors to the front of the trailer. It was a major inconvenience as it then couldn't be tipped on a loading bay, and the company had to arrange to take it to a local container handling facility to be turned.

The more serious side to it was that when the box was loaded onto our trailers we had to check the security seal number on the back doors, that the number matched our paperwork. If the driver had attempted this check he'd have realised the loading mistake before he left the docks

Took him a long time to live it down.....

[roythebus]

Reminds me of the incident during the miners' strike.. it was decided to use open top containers to move coal on Freightliners. One was via the North London Line from the ECML, Finsbury Park, Canonbury to Dalston Junction where the loco ran round to go the other way to the NLL. Dalston Junction was  a well know spot for bad lads.

 

The coal line was discovered quite early in the dispute and railwaymen had already "blacked" the movement of coal by rail in support of the miners.

 

Well, the baddies found the train regularly stopped at the Dalston Junction home signal for a while, waiting for trains to Broad Street and the loco ran round and decided to help themselves to coal. Train staff became suspicious and they too found the containers contained coal being taken from the tops of the wagons. That coal train was left there an awful long time as the railwaymen decided to "black" further movement of the train.

[Andy Hayter]

Within Europe many of the wagons are 60ft and if carrying just 2 20ft these are loaded over the bogies with a gap between.  A 40ft would be loaded centrally if loaded alone.  

 

Having seen these loaded and off-loaded, I agree that in the main they are loaded as presented.  The majority of loading cranes are simple affairs (a bit like the KIbri or Faller model) and simple lift from one vehicle move a few metres sideways on the gantry and drop onto the other one.  

[The Johnster]

In my day the container wagons were flat open framed 60 footers in permanently coupled 5 car sets, and could load any combination of 10, 20, 30, or 40 foot containers that would fit. Load distribution had to paid attention to, and the crane operators did their best with the information they had, but the actual weight of a loaded container was not always what it said it was, and for that matter neither were the contents.  I can recall working the Danygraig job over one week in which the train was nominally loaded to the maximum allowed every day, and the same class of loco, 52, used each day.  Allowing for the difference in peformance between individual Westerns, the actual experience was that the train was significantly lighter on some days than others; i mean significantly enough for a guard riding on the loco to be aware of and enough to elicit comments from the driver.  In those days there seemed to be a greater variety of type of container, with opens, sheet sided, flats, and tanks in frames of various sorts as well as different lengths, but I am less 'in contact' with the traffic these days and these type may still be around for all I know. 

On another occasion, working one of the Canton freight guards' bottom link Sunday passenger turns, in this case an evening dmu job to Hereford and back, and in heavy rain, we were asked to search the section between Abergavenni and Pontrilas (Pandy switched out on Sundays) for an overdue Edinburgh-Cardiff Freightliner.  We found it stalled hopelessly about a quarter mile short of Llanfihangel, north of the summit, and straddling a catch point which meant that it was unable to move as it was slipping back down the bank every time an attempt was made. 

 

We picked up its guard, who was trudging back in the gathering evening gloom on the 5 mile hike to Pontrilas with the detonators and a red  lamp, just past Pandy, an old hand Canton man called Walter Jones who was more commonly known as 'poor old Wally' down to this sort of misfortune happening a lot to him through bad luck and the spectacularly lubugrious expression and demeanour it engendered in him, wet through, freezing, and a not very happy bunny at all.  This particular service had a manned buffet for some odd reason, and the steward, an ex Ocean Liner man like most of them were, revived him with a hot coffee/alchohol/paprika/worcester sauce concoction of his own devising and Wally was delivered to the waiting Hereford crewed assistant 37 at Pontrilas in a somewhat better state to pilot them on to the rear of his stricken FL train.  Poor old Wally... he reckoned that the train was about 300 tons overloaded, and I thought this was entirely possible, at the same time being very glad of my warm and dry 120... 

 

My view was that loading of Freightliner trains were a highly moveable feast at best.  My best ever recorded run was with a Freightliner train, hauled by an not-long-out-of-works Class 45, a Leeds-Cardiff which I relieved at Gloucester Tramway.  The driver was Arthur Lewis, who could be relied on for a good run, and we ran the allegedly 1,350 ton train the 54 miles from Tramway to Pengam reception, fully observing all speed limits but with a clear road, in 56 minutes start to stop, which I thought was great stuff!  Passenger express timings over the 56 miles Gloucester Central to Cardiff Central were 61 minutes including the Newport stop with class 45/6, with 350 tons trailing, to put this in perspective.  But I would be very reluctant to state with any conviction that the load on the train preparation certificate and the driver's load slip was the actual load of the train!

 

The containers were loaded as presented unless there were specifc instructions otherwise, which I would not have been aware of, that being the Freightliner depot's business.  To the best of my knowledge there were no railway connected final destination or initial loading point facliites, and the start and end of each containers journey was always by road, so it didn't matter much from the railway's point of view.

Edited November 18, 2020 by The Johnster

[eastglosmog]

An example of 20ft and 40ft containers loaded door to door coming down the Birch Coppice Railway  from the container terminal a few years ago:

[TEAMYAKIMA]

On 18/11/2020 at 19:49, eastglosmog said:

An example of 20ft and 40ft containers loaded door to door coming down the Birch Coppice Railway  from the container terminal a few years ago:

 

As the OP may I offer thanks to everyone for an interesting discussion. My knowledge of containers is very limited and I must admit that I assumed that all containers were the same height and so I was interested to see this photo. What are the issues with the taller ones? Limited route availability? Limited number of countries that accept them? How do you differentiate them? Do they have a specific description? Hi-cube?

 

Paul

[Andy Hayter]

I have not come across 20ft containers that are anything other than 8ft high - so a square end cross section. That is not to say they don't exist.  

30fters which I am most familiar with have ranged from 8ft through to 9ft 6in - which I think is getting close to typical Continental loading gauge one on the back of a frame wagon.  

40fters were starting to head the same way for light cargos.  

 

Heights are identified through a code on the back door along with many other features - top hatches for example.  I had a conversion table once but I doubt I could find it in a month of Sundays now. 

[Fat Controller]

19 minutes ago, Andy Hayter said:

I have not come across 20ft containers that are anything other than 8ft high - so a square end cross section. That is not to say they don't exist.  

30fters which I am most familiar with have ranged from 8ft through to 9ft 6in - which I think is getting close to typical Continental loading gauge one on the back of a frame wagon.  

40fters were starting to head the same way for light cargos.  

 

Heights are identified through a code on the back door along with many other features - top hatches for example.  I had a conversion table once but I doubt I could find it in a month of Sundays now. 

30' containers seem to largely have dropped out of use, apart from 'Bulktainer' top-loading, end-tipping boxes, used by Hoyer, IFF and others.

The majority of 40' boxes now seem to be 9' or 9'6" high. There also seem to be some 45' boxes, very easily confused with 13.6m Swap Bodies. It must make it very difficult for the ports and shipping companies to have all these variations.

This site may be of interest:-

https://ukrailwaypics.smugmug.com/The-Humble-Box

The only time I have seen 'Hi-Cube' branding has been on some of the swap-bodies operated by Transfesa, which are sometimes to be found on the Spain- Dagenham trains that work via HS1.

 

[Andy Hayter]

IFF?  There's a name to conjure with.  IIRC taken over by UBC in the 90s.  Blue and white went to red and yellow.

 

30fters were designed specifically for short haul dry bulk goods - plastics, chemicals, cereals etc. - and the number of participants in the market were consequently limited.  A few more participants to throw into the mix - Schmidt, UBC, Talke, Bruhn

 

 

Edited November 22, 2020 by Andy Hayter
Spelling

[F-UnitMad]

35 minutes ago, Fat Controller said:

There also seem to be some 45' boxes, very easily confused with 13.6m Swap Bodies. It must make it very difficult for the ports and shipping companies to have all these variations.

Not particularly, since 45ft boxes use the same twistlock locations as standard 40ft-ers. In fact so do the even longer boxes of 48ft and 53ft common in Nth America, but not allowed in the UK at least, as they would exceed permitted road trailer length regulations.

The only thing about 45ft -vs- 40ft in the UK is that on road trailers you have to use different front twistlock positions for each type - look closely at a 'Sliding skelly' trailer and it will have two sets of twistlocks on the front corners. A Sliding Skelly is one that can be extended/retracted to carry 45, 40, 30 & 20 (or 2 x 20)ft boxes.

[Andy Hayter]

Not so straightforward when stacking containers on a ship though.

[Steadfast]

The other thing with 9'6" boxes is they will usually have yellow and black wasp stripes on the ends, above the doors. Try a search for a 45G1 container and it'll stand out.

Here's a link to how the codes are made up

https://www.bic-code.org/size-and-type-code/

The type code is carried on the end door and both sides.

 

Jo

 

[Andy Hayter]

Thanks for that.  The coding is not complete - no top hatch codes for example - but it shows clearly how containers can be identified by those in the know.

 

[Ravenser]

4 hours ago, Andy Hayter said:

I have not come across 20ft containers that are anything other than 8ft high - so a square end cross section. That is not to say they don't exist.  

30fters which I am most familiar with have ranged from 8ft through to 9ft 6in - which I think is getting close to typical Continental loading gauge one on the back of a frame wagon.  

40fters were starting to head the same way for light cargos.  

 

Heights are identified through a code on the back door along with many other features - top hatches for example.  I had a conversion table once but I doubt I could find it in a month of Sundays now. 

 

Ahem...

From a container shipping point of view, 8' high 20's are about as common as cuniform tablets these days.

 

The height of an ISO standard 20' was originally 8' , but this went up to 8'6" in the early 1970s, and I believe BR had a programme of adjusting platform canopies in the early/mid 1970s to accomodate

 

The only 8' high 20's in my experience were the 20' porthole reefers used on the ANZ trade when I started my carrier. These fitted into slots on the ship with cold air blown in at one porthole and out at the other where they connected to a big cold air plant on the ship. I can't remember for certain if the SA trade porthole reefers (otherwise "blown- air " or 20'insulated boxes ) were also 8' high. I do remember that our chartered ACT 8 (otherwise City of Durban, and surplus to SAECS requirements in the SA trade) had to have the ship's blown air connections rotated for ANZ or SA boxes, 

 

As Fat Controller notes , 30' boxes are now very rare . They were never used deep sea that I know of.  And a snare for the unwary - there are Europallet boxes, usually 40's which are wider than ISO and ain't going in the cell-guides of a  big deepsea boxship. Apparently there were also 10's . Someone I knew years ago once saw some.

 

eastglosmog's photo shows a pair of 40'HC boxes [ 9'6" tall hi-cubes] mixed in with 8'6" high 20's on what is evidently a Maersk block train (Maersk bought P+O Nedlloyd some years ago hence the stray dark grey 40' HC) 

 

45' HCs are a Maersk invention (great, just what the industry needs, a non-modular modular unit...) and are invariably 9'6" high cubes.

 

Possibly someone somewhere has built a  9'6" 20'. With hundreds of millions of container built over 50 years anything is possible...

 

Ideally 40' HCs should go top tier under deck. Or if you're a ship's planner you could do an entire layer of the things on deck above the hatch cover then overstow with a layer of 40'DVs 

 

Shipper's own tanks (normally 20's) are still with us, as are open-tops and flatracks  

 

Shipping lines cope with all this because they only have to worry about their own equipment fleet. If it ain't yours (or leased by you) it's not your problem. Similarly the ports have all the boxes in their container control system under a box number and operator (the 4-letter prefix to the number identifies the owner).

 

Though I have personally come across two unhappy sagas where "ISO plated 20' shipper's owned" wouldn't fit on the ship, and went nowhere at considerable expense. In both cases the boxes concerned had been converted to generators. They may have been ISO-plated, but that was before the conversion people welded big external grills and other lumps onto them.....

 

The first episode as I recall involved 20 x 20' S/O ex Grangemouth or South Shields to the Far East . I still am not quite sure how the first one made it across to Rotterdam on the feeder - but at Rotterdam Delta it stopped. I have a feeling the feeder operator then refused to take it back home . Forget how that one was resolved (what's the Dutch for "oxy-acetylene" and "scrap value" ?)  but we did very promptly and firmly cancel the remaining 19 x 20'S/O . Professionally I am never going to touch another 20' s/o generator unit with a bargepole.....

 

Edited November 22, 2020 by Ravenser

[Ravenser]

Coming back to the Op's original question - nothing goes off a container terminal until it's cleared customs. You would normally not even book delivery until the box has cleared. Ditto on the export leg - if the export entry isn't in, it can't be shipped. I believe HMRC systems are linked with the port systems, and clearance entries are submitted via the port systems. Certainly the customs status of the box is flagged in the port systems and their container control system. The container will not be released by the port or the carrier if it's uncleared or under customs hold.

 

In the normal course of events, you need the doors of the container accessible at the back of the chassis to load or offload the thing. You could detach the trailer, and work from the front - but that's probably going to be a "drop and swap" operation  and that will cost you.

 

Johnster raises the point about variable /incorrect weights. It's a fact that this was a bad grey area for decades. I remember a colleague at my first company referring to a practice of "adjusting" weights to get them away on the train - this specifically referred to heavy 20's of chemicals from ICI through Wilton Freightliner where apparently 3 x 17 tonnes cargo would take you over the wagon limit so one box was declared to BR at 15 tonnes...

 

Weights in the shipping line's booking system were not gospel - they were a forwarder's guesstimate when booking-  and "please recheck all your weights once the docs are in" was a standard first move from allocation control facing an overbooked ship . Or the phone call to an office over a clerical error - "Are you shipping black holes again? You've got 2 x 20' from the Left-Handed Widget Company at 100 tonnes on the booking list. Can you check ?"

 

This was cleaned up about 5 years ago by the introduction of VGM - Verified Gross Mass, before shipment. But there were some occasional nasty cases of overloading over the years. I remember at my first company a ship that didn't sail overnight from Melbourne  "Why hasn't it sailed?" "Well, the crane's not working" . "Why isn't it working? " "Well it broke. " "How did it break???" "Well, it was lifting a container at the time" . Apparently someone had managed to load nearly 50 tonnes of deadweight cargo in a 20'. When the container crane tried to lift it , the top, sides and end of thev box went up in the air - and the bottom of the box with the cargo sat on it stayed on the quay. This damaged the crane.... 

Edited November 22, 2020 by Ravenser

[Andy Hayter]

30fters- not so much are they are used on  are specific traffics.  Yes not long sea - but I did say that earlier - but short sea quite widely used on specific flows.

 

UBC have 1500 units according to their publicity.

Karl Schmidt does not disclose a number but I know it is more than insignificant.

 

Compared to 20ft and 40ft from China and the Far East the numbers will be small, but within Europe at least do not discount them.  UBC claim 150,000  movements = 10 per container per year.  No way a Chinese container will get close to that in Europe.