Fairland (ship)
.jpg) The Fairland before being converted into a container ship
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The Fairland was the first container ship to call at a European port.
After the haulier Malcom McLean in 1955 a 75 percent share of its forwarding had sold McLean Trucking Company for six million US dollars, he invested this money in the acquisition of the shipping company Pan-Atlantic, which he later SeaLand Industries renamed. In 1956 he put the Ideal X into service as the first container ship . The following year, the Gateway City, the first ship in the Sea-Land C2-C class series of six, was put into service. The Fairland also belonged to this more modern type of ship .
history
The C2-S-E1 cargo ship Fairland was built in 1942 at Gulf Shipbuilding Corp. built in Chickasaw , United States as hull number 3 for the Waterman Steam Shipping Corporation in Mobile .
McLean acquired it in 1955 and had it extensively converted into a container ship in 1957 . It was operated on a scheduled service between the east coast ports of the United States to replace the Ideal X , which had just been commissioned , and its three sister ships, which were also converted. McLean had a total of six C2-S-E1 combi-ships converted in the same way, which, in particular due to the higher container capacity, allowed the services to be rapidly expanded into numerous other areas. The Fairland was the first container ship in San Juan , Puerto Rico in 1958 . After several years in SeaLand's USA service, the Fairland opened the first transatlantic container service in April 1966. The first port of call in Europe was Rotterdam on May 3, 1966 . On May 6, 1966, the first handling of the Fairland in Bremen's overseas port followed. The next European port was Grangemouth in Scotland , where whiskey mainly destined for the USA was loaded.
The ship remained in service until 1975 when it was sold for demolition. This began in Hong Kong in December 1975 .
Container arrangement
While the Ideal X was being prepared for the transport of containers by so-called "Spardecks" above the actual main deck construction, each container still had to be lashed individually on deck and in particular the freighters and unloaders had been convinced of the feasibility of container transport Fairland another way. During the renovation, the ship was widened by almost three meters and designed so that the containers on deck and in the holds could be stowed one above the other and cell guides could be used. This makes it the first representative of this principle of the still new type of ship in 1957, which is still used today, and a pioneer of intermodal transport .
literature
- Harald Focke : The first containers came to the Weser. 50 years ago, the tin boxes triggered a transport revolution in Germany . In: Men from Morgenstern , Heimatbund an Elbe and Weser estuary e. V. (Ed.): Niederdeutsches Heimatblatt . No. 796 . Nordsee-Zeitung GmbH, Bremerhaven April 2016, p. 3–4 ( digitized version [PDF; 739 kB ; accessed on July 30, 2019]).