What is your favorite kind of shipping container?

My sister asked me this today.

Here's my answer:

The thing about shipping containers is that they're standardized. They all have to be pretty much identical, in order to take advantage of the infrastructure. The cranes, the railroad cars, the truck trailer chassis, the bays in the container ships, the locking bolts... these all assume containers of specific standard dimensions.

That said, there is some variation in length. There's the current standard 40-foot shipping container. This is the most common type, easily identified by the heavy corner posts with the slots in them for the locking bolts. They are just about exactly as long as the truck trailer chassis they ride on.

Then there's the original standard 20-foot container, dating back to the 70s, when the industry finally settled on the current standards. Most railway cars, trailer chassis, etc. can be adapted to lock onto these shorter boxes.

Then there's the new extended containers. There's actually a lot of these around. These range from 50 to 53 feet or so in length, and are characterized by extensions beyond the 40-foot corner posts. So they're longer than the standard 40-footers, but because their posts are still in the same place, they can lock onto any platform built for 40-foot containers. They can even stack on top of 40-foot containers, which you might see sometimes on a train: A 40-footer on the bed of the car, and then a 50-footer on top of it.

As far as I know, you can't put two 20-footers end-to-end, and pretend they're a 40-footer for the purposes of transportation or stacking. At least, I've never seen it done.

Anyway, since all containers are pretty much the same, my favoritism tends more towards the liveries and provenances of the various shipping companies.

Pacer Stacktrain uses a lot of extended (50+ foot) containers, and they have a striking dark blue color scheme, with bright orange corner posts. Also, their name evokes the early days of containerization--stacking pre-loaded boxes on flatbeds, instead of paying stevodores union wages to move your cargo in and out of boxcars.

Then there's Matson. White containers, with the name in blue. Matson was founded by the guy who came up with the whole container idea, back in the 50s, and still bears his name. Maersk, with the seven-pointed star logo, is another old name, the first shipping company to invest big in containerization on the west coast. Their contribution to west coast shipping infrastructure paved the way for the big asian shipping companies that dominate the industry today.

There's Evergreen (green containers, natch), a big shipper out of Taiwan. China Shipping (teal containers with their name in white), headquartered in Shanghai. Hyundai (red, white, and blue colors) is the shipping subsidiary of the giant Korean conglomerate.

Then there's the European companies, whose names evoke their old-world commercial legacy: Hapag-Lloyd, Florens, Hamburg Sud. I almost expect to see a British East India Compay container on the road one of these days.

Then there's the upstarts, like J.B. Hunt. This is a north-american trucking company that specializes in less-than-truckload shipping. Historically they'd use regular trailers to transport a bunch of different shipments to a bunch of different recipients in the same area. But in recent years, they started investing in what I call "fake-tainers". These are container-style boxes, that can fit onto chassis and train cars. But since J.B. Hunt isn't planning on stacking them six high on a container ship bound for another continent they've economized on the materials. Their fake-tainers have lighter sidewalls, and can only be stacked two or three high, rather than the standard six. This allows Hunt to easily transfer a trailer to a containerized train for cheap cross-country transport, and then back to a truck chassis for local delivery. And lighter weight means the boxes are cheaper to build and take less gas to haul down the road.

Very recently I've seen Dole fruit company containers. Apparently they're commissioning their own boxes, rigged with refrigeration gear (this is actually a common thing, supported by the standard infrastructure; train cars and ships will have power hookups for refrigerated containers), to make their fruit-distribution operation more efficient.

And twice now, I've seen a container co-branded with the Hub Group (a major North American shipping company--orange with their Hexagon-H logo in white) and the Burlington-NorthernSanta Fe railroad logos. Co-branded containers are very rare, in my experience.

Um. I guess I should say I don't really have a "favorite". But that's not quite true.

Of all the liveries, the shipping company I like best is MOL. Their color is grey, and their logo is a cheerful alligator carrying an MOL shipping container on his shoulder. He has an anchor tattoo on his other shoulder. They're also one of the only Japanese shipping companies I know of. You might be interested (or disturbed) to know that their alligator logo has a substantial cult following. I did not know about this until I poked around on the web to see if they sold t-shirts. I am not the first to have done so, by far. Unfortunately they're in the process of updating their image, switching to a white-and-blue color scheme, and dropping the alligator. So, if you ever see an old-school MOL container on the road, enjoy it while it lasts!

Other things to look for: One company's container on another company's chassis (or a chassis owned by a company that just leases chassis to container companies).