The Anonymous Widower

Container Ships Are Getting Bigger

i always trawl the BBC’s web site in the morning to look for thought provoking articles.  This one about the latest generation of container ships is fascinating. Describing the capacity of the ship it uses this paragraph.

Each will contain as much steel as eight Eiffel Towers and have a capacity equivalent to 18,000 20-foot containers (TEU).

If those containers were placed in Times Square in New York, they would rise above billboards, streetlights and some buildings.

Or, to put it another way, they would fill more than 30 trains, each a mile long and stacked two containers high. Inside those containers, you could fit 36,000 cars or 863 million tins of baked beans.

It also talks about the knock-on effects of such large ships for ports.

Ship owners also want vessels to be unloaded and loaded within 24 hours, which has various knock-on effects. More space is needed to store the containers in the harbour, and onward connections by road, rail and ship need to be strengthened to cope with the huge surge in traffic.

Felixstowe, which handles 42% of the UK’s container trade, has 58 train movements a day, but plans to double that after it opens a third rail terminal later this year.

Have we got the capacity on the railways to move that large number of boxes?

No!

The next big complaint from the public, will be the noise of freight trains rumbling through their neighbourhood at all hours of the day. The standard freight engines, the Class 66, are not the quietest of beasts.

So for a start, all of the freight routes, like Felixstowe to Nuneaton and Gospel Oak to Barking must be electrified.

But that will only be a stop-gap and we need to put in new lines to the north of the United Kingdom. At least HS2, if it is to be built will be a start.

February 19, 2013 - Posted by AnonW | Transport/Travel | Class 66 Locomotive, Felixstowe, Freight, Ship, Trains