Securing Containers

I spent the week in the California watching countless stack trains and two questions keep bugging me:

1.) What keeps the top container on double stacks from just falling off on turns?

2.) When you have a small container and a big container, why do they put the big one on top of the small one?

Containers are locked together at the ends with connectors. On 20- and 40-foot containers these connectors are at the corners, while on longer containers they are set in to align with the 40-foot containers. This is the same way they are held together on container ships.

With well cars, longer containers don't necessarily have to be on top; I have seen 40-foot containers on top of longer containers. However, some older well cars can only accomodate a 40-foot or 48-foot container on the bottom, requiring that 48-foot or 53-foot containers be on top. Newer well cars are built to accomodate 53-foot containers on the bottom. Also, 20-foot containers can't be stacked on top of longer containers, because the longer containers don't have connector castings in the middle to hold them.

Tryed to find ya a picture of one with no luck, after a few searches i found that intermodal interbox connectors was the technical term used for the "pins" that hold them together. I saw one laying by the track, ill try to get a picture of it next time im out that way.

OOOP there ya a go. These ones look like there a bit more jazzed up then the ones ive saw. Heres the link: http://www.peckhale.com/Intermodal242.php

I'll still try to get a pic of the more common ones in use.

Thanks, I thought there might be some kind of lock, but when you see tv programs they just load the containers and high ball, they don't show the pins securing.

I'm assuming they use automatic pins?

No the containers have to be manually secured http://www.cmncomponents.com/ibc.htm.
Only on the trailer frames that are used within port are containers only held by gravity on pins without locks.

(If you think we never loose any) There use to be a guy here who worked in a port, he said they fall off the ships at sea quite a bit, also one did come off here a while back in a curve, dumped her off in the sage brush. Sometimes on a train you can see where theres a few of the connectors that havent been locked into place, you'll see the lever hanging out to the side.

Floating containers are quite a hazard to small boats in the pacific island area . I'm not sure if they lock all of them together on ships or not , that would be quite a job . we call them twistlocks .

Yes on ships they use twist locks and lashings to keep thm on deck you would be surprised at what a rough sea can do to a stack of containers.



when not properly lashed this happens.

On ships, the containers in a stack are generally locked together, with the containers toward the bottom of the stack lashed down, as illustrated in pictures at the following links, which also illustrate how containers are lost as sea, and that they can float. (Pictures start about halfway down each page)
http://www.cargolaw.com/2006nightmare_leda_maersk.html
http://www.cargolaw.com/2007nightmare_ital.florida.html
http://www.cargolaw.com/2008nightmare_jeppesen.html

Calls to mind the sailor's old prayer: "O Lord, thy sea is so great and my ship is so small!"

wow , those twistlocls hold on . i saw some container stacks in the port that had blown a container of the top , so thought they wernt locked . must be quite a job to lock / unlock them .

Thanks westr for those links. There's some really awesome stuff in there. One ship lost over 650 containers in a single accident!!! Hard to imagine the claims of losing 10,000 containers a year overboard. The oceans must be littered with them.........

DutchRailnut wrote:Yes on ships they use twist locks and lashings to keep thm on deck you would be surprised at what a rough sea can do to a stack of containers.



when not properly lashed this happens.

I'll have to look for that next time a ship comes up the chessapeke bay!

westr wrote:With well cars, longer containers don't necessarily have to be on top; I have seen 40-foot containers on top of longer containers. However, some older well cars can only accomodate a 40-foot or 48-foot container on the bottom, requiring that 48-foot or 53-foot containers be on top. Newer well cars are built to accomodate 53-foot containers on the bottom.

A slight correction to this post (that I just realized is two years old!): 40' well cars aren't necessarily older and 53' wells aren't necessarily newer. They're built to serve two distinct markets, those being the international market (dominated by 20', 40' and 45' equipment) and the domestic market (now almost exclusively 53' equipment). Overall, the NA 53' fleet is newer, but only because the 53' container is, itself, pretty new. Sure, (most) 53' wells can carry 20'/40' boxes, which makes them more versatile as a 40' ART well car can't carry 53' boxes even on the top deck. However, the roads often try to segregate their international and domestic business... and they really frown on putting a 40' in a 53' as it's highly inefficient from a train-length perspective.

By the way, David Benton... we use the same term (twistlocks) for IBCs in the US... must be a universal term.