Articles
Container shipping
Forty-five years ago, on 19 June 1971, the first all-container ship to visit New Zealand arrived in Wellington. Columbus New Zealand was part of a worldwide revolution in shipping. These simple steel boxes would change our transport industry, our ports and how we work and shop.
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Page 2 – The container is born
A US trucker’s ‘out of the box’ solution led to the container shipping system we know today
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Page 3 – Transforming shipping
By the late 1960s, the valuable Atlantic trade was being containerised. New Zealand ports followed developments closely, since some ports were expected to lose much of their
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Page 4 – Transforming our ports
Containerisation changed the very look of our ports. In the 1970s the four cellular container ports – Auckland, Wellington, Lyttelton and Port Chalmers – reclaimed land, filled
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Page 5 – Transforming our economy
Containers changed everything. Railways ordered fleets of flat-deck rolling stock and ‘daylighted’ tiny Victorian tunnels so they could get through. Truckers bought heavy-duty
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Page 6 – Afterlife of shipping containers
Most containers pass into the hands of a new industry that has arisen to modify them for other uses, or sell or lease them. The term ‘container architecture’ was coined to
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Page 7 – The wreck of the Rena
On 5 October 2011 the MSC-chartered, Liberian-flagged container ship Rena astonished local mariners by grounding on the clearly marked Astrolabe Reef off Tauranga. Three months
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Page 8 – Further information
Links and books related to container shipping
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Main image: Container cranes at Port of Napier
Ports too small to justify the expense of gantry cranes use wheeled mobile container cranes
