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THE NOISY NOTION

An international expert in the field of Continental road haulage discusses such questions as roll-on/roll-off versus lift-on/lift-off; the type and size of unit loads; and the ownership of the equipment.

BY JAN POSNER

AEUROPEAN unit load operator who in 1965 might have lifted his head from his desk to seek inspiration from the stars, stood little chance of seeing them: the kites were flying high and the sky was thick with pie. The darting shadows on the horizon were planes flying west with European transport men on board in search of the promised Sea-Land. Everybody from trade journals to the business supplements of Sunday newspapers was talking containers. New companies in this country and abroad sprung up by the dozen, and even people who have grown up in transport could be excused for feeling slightly bewildered by references to cellular ships, I.S.O. corner castings, twist locks, Flexivans and the talk about the hundreds of millions of dollars and pounds which are being spent or reserved for the conversion of freight transport to containers and other kinds of unit loads.

People who for years have travelled up and down the country by rail might ask themselves what has suddenly happened. After all they remember seeing in sidings and goods yards hundreds of British Railways containers standing on wagons. They might therefore think that all this talk is only the result of clever Public Relations activity and that what we are seeing is only a development towards extra and possibly bigger containers.

In fact we are witnessing considerably more. There comes a time when an increase in size, number, or for that matter speed, gives to a certain aspect of life a new dimension. There can be hardly any doubt now that we are in the middle of a revolution of freight transport, both by land and by sea, and ultimately by air. It cannot exactly be called a silent revolution, but it is a revolution for all that. Like all revolutions it had to come, because of certain economic factors which made it absolutely essential, if the transport of goods was not to become an unbearably high cost factor, to develop a new method of despatching which reduced the actual amount of handling.

The method of sending goods in unit loads was most suitable in cases where cargo had to cross the sea but there could hardly be as much justification for introducing containers and flats if the same job could quite reasonably be done by a lorry. The enormous development of containerization is therefore concerned primarily with traffic which has to move from one medium of transport to another in the normal course of events.

The whole concept of unit loads becomes very much involved with the affluent society which according to economists has existed in the western world since the war. Until then there had hardly been any development in dock handling for decades. Agreed, there were more mechanical handling facilities, but basically it was the handling of goods in individual small packages. This may be in order when labour is cheap and plentiful, but becomes prohibitive when one lives in a time of a 40-hour week and high standards of living. The ratio of material and labour costs has changed very drastically in the past 30 years and everybody concerned with transport found the terminal charges, whether in ports or warehouses, increased to a far greater degree than the actual transport costs. In many cases—say over short sea crossings—they are appreciably greater than the actual cost of shipping. There is also another side effect of the affluent society. The nature and type of goods which are now being carried both domestically and internationally is changing. The percentage of manufactured goods is increasing all the time as are the individual packages to be transported. At the same time there has been a narrowing of the gap between what one might call packaging for display and distribution and packing for export. Far more goods are now being sent from one country to another in cartons than, say, 20 years ago, and the standard wooden export case which used to be the feature of docks all over the world is to a certain degree disappearing.

There was a problem—a strictly technological one—of moving the containers from a lorry or a rail wagon to a ship, or vice versa. The unit loads became much heavier over the years, and today one could not hope as a shipowner or other transport undertaking to be in the container business unless one had facilities in the region of 30 tons. The introduction of modern mobile cranes, of straddle carriers, and of very fast gantries has even brought about the hitherto unheard of state of affairs whereby some advanced operators consider the lifting of containers as part of general overheads. We have come a long way from the days—not so very long ago—when even in the large ports in the United Kingdom, any unit weighing say 20 tons could only be lifted by a floating crane at considerable expense.

The whole unit load concept depends, of course, on the principle that goods are handled only twice: once at the point of actual despatch, such as the manufacturer's premises, and the second time at the warehouse of the recipient. There may be intermediate points as, for instance, when containers are used for the collection of small consignments, but in any case it is a truism to say that a container or any other kind of unit load must at some time be put on wheels.

Here we come to another root of the revolution: it could only come about at a time when road transport in industrialized countries and particularly in those where distances are not too great, had completed its successful "takeover bid" for the carriage of goods from the railways.

Taking all these factors together there emerge ideal unit load conditions and the U.K. is rich in them. Here we have short inland distances, relatively high labour costs, narrow seas, and an enormous flow of trade in both directions both to the continent of Europe and beyond. It is therefore not surprising that immediately after the war, unit loads were introduced on various routes.

It would be quite impossible to write an article like this without mentioning at some stage the now legendary figure of Col. Frank Bustard who, here at least, started it all. The only suitable craft available at that time were tank landing ships, which were pressed into commercial service both on the Irish and the Continental run with considerable success. Many others have since jumped on to this particular bandwagon but Col. Bustard himself was probably better aware than others of the ultimate limitations of the service which these ships could provide.

Today the discussions and the thinking on the future of unit loads centre on three points: 1. Roll-on/roll-off versus lift-on/lift-off.

2. The type and size of unit loads.

3. The ownership of the unit load equipment: the ship, the container leasing company, or the road haulier.

Short Hauls

The first of these arguments is basically one of short hauls. It has already been settled for long ocean voyages, and an attempt to introduce a roll-on/roll-off service across the Atlantic was pretty disastrous. Roll-on has undoubted advantages, the foremost being that units are loaded at a warehouse and will never leave the ground until they are delivered on the other side. This, however, brings us right back to the old concept of containerization and unit loads which offered as a main attraction the safety of the goods.

Although this still applies in many instances, there is no doubt that we have reached now a second stage, namely one where unit loading is not only safer, but in many instances, because of its nature, cheaper. Operation by a roll-on/roll-off service must be, basically, more expensive than a lift-on/lift-off service: the equipment is more expensive, a trailer costing twice as much as a container and about seven times as much as an open platform.

What is more importauIt the utilization of the ships (which are in any case more expensive than a comparable vessel equipped for the carriage of containers only) must by the nature of the beast be worse. Wheels are not only expensive to ship, but they also take up unnecessary room.

It has always been one of the most expensive hobbies of shipping to pay for air space and a look at the lorry deck of a roll-on ferry will show that there is an awful amount of air being sent across the seas. In fact it is the same problem which British Rail are now encountering with their train ferries. In the normal course of events one could have expected by now that there would be a decrease in roll-on/roll-off ships and an equivalent increase in container ships.

That this has not happened is due basically to the fact that unit loads to Europe and Northern Ireland were initially conditioned by the tank landing ships available, this producing a slightly vicious circle. Road hauliers and others who saw immediately the enormous advantages which they could offer to clients for the carriage of large quantities of goods, embarked on a programme of building equipment for roll-on/roll-off services and in the process spent considerable amounts of money. This equipment is not really suitable for anything else. It is built to special standards and of a type which is not normally used at present in this country.

As it exists and has not as yet been written down, there is a necessity for shipowners to offer space for trailers. Full trailers are still being built, but probably in smaller numbers than say five years ago, and a great many road hauliers have now gone over or are going over to a system which combines the advantages of both roll-on and lift-on by providing equipment which is fully demountable.

This not only keeps them in the swim for any future developments, but also, by careful calculation, can reduce the overall cost of the equipment because there is no necessity any longer to provide one chassis for each load-carrying body. The other factor and, from the point of view of a pure freight man, a rather regrettable one, is that roll-on/roll-off became mixed up with the tourist trade. Looked at from the shipowner's point of view there is of course a considerable advantage in this, as he has access to more than one source of revenue. Looked at from the point of view of the cargo and the persons providing the cargo, there are drawbacks. If it is accepted that with suitable handling facilities at either end a pure lift-on/lift-off service must be most economical, we are now in a situation where everybody has to pay roll-on prices for lift-on equipment. In most instances the lift-on equipment is rolled on in any case by the shipping company providing ships' trailers.

The American invasion which is going to start in Europe this year will probably bring about a quicker change than hitherto could have been expected. There is no half measure about the American thinking on this particular problem and they quite obviously, and because of the long sea voyages, will be pumping into Europe an enormous number of containers of various sizes. Once this happens it will not be long before there are pure container ships in the European trade.

European Trend

The second problem, namely the type of equipment to be used, is once again a European affair. It has been said that lorries and unwheeled equipment go in three stages of development: flat, tiltequipped and, ultimately, box-type vehicles. It is of considerable interest to' note the difference in equipment on the roads in this country, in Europe generally, and in America, because it seems to express these three stages.

Roll-on/roll-off operators in this country have of necessity had to follow to a large degree the European trend, and have put into service tilt-equipped vehicles. The British standard unit, namely a wellsheeted flat vehicle, has never really caught on on the Continent, although it offers definite advantages. As long as the present general rating system on the unit load ships is maintained, on a square or linear footage basis, quite considerable savings can be made by using Lancashire flats or flat trailers.

The Lancashire flat in particular is a versatile piece of equipment being cheap to manufacture and having the advantage that it can, when it has to be returned empty, be stacked eight-high. By the same token it cannot be stacked when it is loaded and this may ultimately be the downfall of this very handy method of shipment in unit loads. Once we move into the era of ships of a cellular construction then the Lancashire flat will die out. It is for this reason that there is hardly any chance of it being generally adopted for long sea voyages, say between Europe and America.

It must, of course, also be admitted that a flat trailer has certain disadvantages where there are frontier crossings involved. The tilt-equipped vehicle, or tilted Lancashire flat, offers far greater advantages in this respect but it seems to be a halfway house at best. Although it offers a possibility of overhead loading, this once again depends upon facilities at the point of collection and delivery. With the increased use of loading banks, fork-lift trucks and palletization, the complete box either as a trailer or as a container can offer the same advantages.

Whose Container?

The third point of discussion, ownership of the equipment, is one which in the long run may have the farthest reaching effect.

When unit load shipments started from this country to Northern Ireland and later to the Continent, the equipment itself was provided by road hauliers, forwarding agents, and the railways. There seems to be now a different trend in European trade. One roll-on/ roll-off ferry which will start this summer from the Humber area to Sweden is already considering a system whereby the shipping company will supply containers for the use of everyone who might want them. This particular shipping company is therefore setting up in immediate competition to those who have been the traditional unit load operators in this country.

Developments which are now taking place in the long haul business seem to indicate the same trend. The shipping companies themselves are container organizations. In the United States (and it is of course always wise to look at what is happening in the United States if one wants to know what is going to happen in the rest of the Western world tomorrow) we find the same. The container operation is centred around the ship. As the ship is by far the most expensive piece of equipment in any large scale unit load operation, this is understandable.

Although no shipping company in their right minds will ever turn away freight from anyone who might wish to offer it, it is probably right to say that we shall see a development on long haul unit loads whereby the shipping company, or a combination of them, will own and run the containers. They may not insist on owning the means of transportation from the docks to the ultimate point of delivery, but no doubt they will want to do this on a strictly sub-contracting basis and maintain control. It is a question of control of the overall movement which seems to be so desperately important in any unit load operation.

It is just possible that the same will not happen in short sea trade. One can run a service between this country to north-west Europe with relatively small, simple and cheap vessels. It will therefore happen (as it has already happened in the Irish trade) that unit load operators will charter these ships and will then be able to run a service in direct and no doubt effective opposition to the shipping companies who are considering going in for their own container ships.

Between these two categories there are the container leasing companies who offer to operators and customers a great advantage of getting the benefits of a container without having to invest capital. Whether they will be able to compete in the atmosphere which is now developing must at least be open to o.oubt. It is always cheaper to own than to hire. In common with other branches of industry and commercial life we shall, without any doubt, see in the future a concentration into fewer but larger hands. This is something which has already started in America, and which is also now starting in this country. The emergence of two consortia of shipping companies to enter the container field is significant.

Amidst all these discussions there is one person who must not be forgotten: the customer. Unless a unit load operator, whether a shipping company, a road haulier or an agent, can offer him definite advantages, he will not use him. Reading the advertisements which appear in various trade journals, one is impressed by the fact that what is being offered to the customer at this stage are the same advantages which were very successfully offered some time ago by air freight operators. There is great talk of safety, of speed, of the absence of handling, the absence of pilferage and altogether the feather-bedding of the cargo which the unit load operator carries.

All this is, of course, perfectly true, and these advantages exist, but ultimately it will depend on one thing only: the price. There are confident forecasts that in the near future 75 per cent of all general cargo which could go into a container, will be shipped in that manner. In other words, one does not speak of delicate machinery any more, but one speaks of items such as wire, cloth and even sand and bricks. There are still various obstacles to be overcome.

There is, however, at present so much money involved that they must be overcome and the target which the unit load operators are setting themselves will certainly be met before we are all very much older.