My uncle Graham leaned out the window while the car was going 100 kilometres an hour, as the snow fell in the cold Canadian winter, so he could take photographs of a typical prairie train.
To me, a Saskatchewan boy, that train and the dozen others like it that we saw on the highway between Regina and Winnipeg, was nothing special. It was just a mile-long string of rail cars being pulled across our vast, flat expanse.
But to Uncle Graham it was exotic, fantastical. Back in England, where he lived, you never saw long “goods trains,” he told me. Over there, almost all trains are passenger trains.
I can’t recall if the trains we were seeing were grain trains or potash trains or boxcar, automobile or mixed-bag trains. I don’t remember if there were container trains on that day. It was too commonplace for me to enter into long-term memory. But that situation, seeing Uncle Graham’s delight with this exotic logistics system, has stayed with me since that experience in the 2000s.
Last week, as I drove to and from Regina on our first get-out-of-Winnipeg journey since COVID-19 struck, I peered closely at the trains we saw hauling massive amounts of commodities and manufactured goods east and west across the middle of the continent. I was struck by how many were long, long trains of nothing but containers, stacked two-high and representing all the major ocean haulers on the planet.
This is nothing new, at least in the last 10 years, but I suddenly saw much more in the details of each train than I normally did. As part of my summer reading program I’m consuming Marc Levinson’s The Box: How the Shipping Container Made the World Smaller and the World Economy Bigger.
It is, believe it or not, a gripping history and story of the birth, growth and development of the shipping container and how it has come to dominate world trade.
It’s a fabulous book and I recommend each one of you order a copy. If you’ve made it this far in this column, you obviously have an unnatural interest in railways, freight and other matters of commodity logistics, so you’ll enjoy it.
What I found most interesting in Levinson’s account (spoiler alert) is the deft way he explains the revolutionary changes needed throughout the global shipping system to allow a simple technological innovation like a steel shipping container to work on a commercial basis.
Inventing a rectangular steel box wasn’t rocket science. But getting trucks, longshore workers, docks, ships and trains all working together to make container shipping commercially viable took over two decades. In fact, numerous early versions of the shipping container had been tried since the 1920s, but it took until the 1950s for somebody to put in the excruciating effort, and to accept the white-knuckle financial crises, in order to create the beginnings of a factory-to-truck-to-port-to-port-to-truck-to-user system.
The (anti) hero at the heart of the system, Malcolm Purcell McLean, had to struggle with trucking regulations, longshore union contracts, port authorities, vested interests in the shipping industry, governments and a giant list of technical issues to evolve a system that would work.
It didn’t matter if it was theoretically possible to ship stuff by container if it didn’t save the shipper money or time, and getting that right took years.
But by the late 1960s container shipping had not just become generally embraced by the global freight business but was seen as its future.
Still, it took decades longer for the developing systems to dominate the shipping industry so profoundly that it is now the main form of traffic moving into and out of ports. Shipping containers had to be standardized, which required container ships to be standardized, which wasn’t great if you had a wrong-shaped ship or favoured a different standard.
Entrenched unions had to be convinced to embrace container shipping, or to be avoided, often by avoiding an entire port, like New York’s.
Regulators had to be on-side, on both sides of shipping routes, often on opposite sides of oceans.
What I found particularly interesting was Levinson’s pondering of the question of why nobody had previously given much thought or ink to the history of container shipping, since it is arguably the key to the phenomenon of globalization, which is the most significant development of the past few decades.
I’m writing about this for you because I think it reveals a fundamental truth about the supply chain systems we’re all part of. It’s not the result of some brilliant innovation that creates a miracle, but a compilation of painstaking improvements and co-ordination that occurs from one end of the chain to the other. If any significant link breaks, the whole chain doesn’t work.
This has always been farmers’ fate: they depend utterly upon long supply chains over which they have little influence. That’s why farmers and their organizations have always focused on grain transportation and packing plant capacities and restrictive regulations and the power of vested interests to stifle efficiency.
In the end, the farmer’s profitability is dependent upon a highly functioning system, and no amount of brilliance and skill by the farmer alone can make up for a marketing system that allows inefficiencies to gobble up returns and suffocates more efficient means of getting the product from the producer to the end user.
There are still a couple of weeks of summer left. If you don’t have a full table of summer reading books before you, I recommend you get a copy of The Box. You won’t ever again look at those long container trains the same.
You might even end up leaning out the window of a car travelling down a snowbound prairie highway, eyes newly opened to the wonder of the shipping container, a miracle you never realized was right before your eyes.
