Containers

Cold Spring Shops tells us it's the 50th anniversery of the container. He remarks that deep-sea container traffic is one of the biggest growth areas for the US railroads

It's true in Britain as well; this one of Freightliner's GM-built class 66s at Colchester, bound for the port of Felixtowe. Knowing the state of British manufacturing industry, it's likely that most of the containers will be empty.

Freightliner has an interesting history. It started out as a domestic intermodal service in the 1960s, intended as the long-term replacement for internal wagonload freight. That never happened; the distances involved meant that it couldn't compete with direct road haulage as the motorway network expanded, and the domestic traffic slowly faded away. But Freighliner repositioned itself in a new market hauling boxes from ports, and traffic is now booming.