Gateway City
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The Gateway City was the first full container ship (English: "cellular container vessel") on which containers were stowed and locked on top of one another according to today's principle.
After the haulier Malcom McLean sold a 75 percent stake in his McLean Trucking Co. for US $ 6 million in 1955, he invested this money in the acquisition of the shipping company Pan-Atlantic, which he later renamed SeaLand Industries . In 1956, he put the Ideal X into service as the world's first container ship .
history
The C2-S-E1 combination ship Sumter was built in 1942/43 at the Gulf Shipbuilding Corporation shipyard in Chickasaw , United States , as hull number 5 on behalf of the War Shipping Administration in San Francisco .
The ship was first laid down as Iberville in 1942 and renamed to this name again in the year after the end of the war. In 1947 it was christened Gateway City before McLean acquired it in 1955 and had it extensively converted into a container ship in 1957 . It was supposed to be operated in the regular service between the east coast ports of the United States in order to replace the Ideal X, which had just been put into service, and its sister ships, which had also been converted. The maiden voyage as a container ship began on October 4, 1957, the day on which Sputnik 1 also took off, on the route from Newark (New Jersey) via Miami to Houston ( Texas ) and proceeded without any significant difficulties. McLean had five more C2-S-E1 combination ships converted in the same way. These six ships formed the Sea-Land C2-C class , which, in particular due to the higher container capacity, made it possible to expand the services, initially to Puerto Rico in 1958 and later quickly to numerous other areas. The Gateway City's first Puerto Rico voyage was a failure because the ship was refused to unload, but the service quickly caught on.
The ship stayed in service until 1978 when it was sold for demolition. This began in Hong Kong in October 1978 .
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 at Gateway City take a different route. 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 ship type, which was still new in 1957, which is still used today, and a pioneer of intermodal transport . Due to the lack of infrastructure in the ports at that time, in the form of container cranes or other suitable handling equipment , the Gateway City was equipped with a gantry crane on deck .
literature
- Schönknecht, Rolf; Laue, Uwe: ocean freighters of world shipping . Volume 1. transpress Verlag, Berlin 1987, ISBN 3-344-00182-5 (library of ship types).