Overseas Containers Limited
The Overseas Containers (OCL) was a union of more 1965 British started company Container Lines shipping company .
history
The joint venture was founded in 1965 by the liner shipping companies Ocean Steamship Company, the parent company of Blue Funnel Line , Glen Line and Elder Dempster , the Peninsular and Oriental Steam Navigation Company , Furness Withy , the parent company of Shaw Savill & Albion Steamship Company , and British & Commonwealth Shipping Company , the parent company of the Clan Line and the Union-Castle Linefounded in order to be able to gain a foothold in the container business, which was new at the time, without having to cope with the large investments involved alone. The background to this was the fast-growing long-haul container traffic worldwide, in which competitors, such as the container pioneers Sea-Land Corporation or the Associated Container Transportation consortium, which was founded shortly thereafter, purchased large amounts of cargo from conventional general cargo line traffic. Alfred Holt's Ocean Steamship Company was the main shareholder in OCL with 49% and was in charge of the design of the container ships to be built .
After individual containerized cargo had been shipped beforehand, the OCL received six Encounter Bay class ships, starting in the spring of 1969 . These first newbuildings, the ship names of which all ended in Bay , began the Europe-Southeast-Australia liner service on March 6, 1969 with Encounter Bay . This initially generated heavy losses for the first few years, but was also considered to be the pacemaker and market leader in the region.
In 1974 Ocean Transport & Trading was established with the shipping companies Blue Funnel Line, Glen Line and the Nederlandsche Stoomvaart Maatschappij "Oceaan" (NSMO) as the successor company of Alfred Holt. Ocean Transport & Trading entered into a partnership called Ben-Ocean with the shipping company Ben Line , whose ships, however, all carried in the colors of the Ben Line.
P&O continuously increased its stake in the consortium and in 1986 bought the remaining 53% from Ocean Transport & Trading, whose subsidiaries Glen Line, Elder Dempster, Shaw, Savill & Albion, Clan Line and Union Castle Line disappeared at the same time, as well as the British & Commonwealth. On January 1, 1987, the OCL became part of P&O Containers Ltd (P & OCL). This was merged with Nedlloyd in 1996. In August 2005, P&O Nedlloyd was bought by the AP Moller-Maersk Group and from February 2006 it was continued as Maersk Line.
The OCL ships
The designs of the first OCL ships went back to Marshall Meek, the chief shipbuilding engineer and director of the OCL's Ocean Fleets design department, which belonged to the parent company Ocean Steamship Company, which also controlled the Blue Funnel Line. The first six ships in the Encounter Bay class were also the world's first second-generation container ships and had a capacity of 1,530 TEU. The Encounter Bay , Discovery Bay , Moreton Bay , Botany Bay , Jervis Bay and Flinders Bay were all built in German shipyards.
From 1972 a second series of six 2961 TEU container ships of the third generation followed. This Liverpool Bay class included the Liverpool Bay , Jervis Bay , Cardigan Bay , Kowloon Bay , Tokyo Bay and Osaka Bay , which together with Hapag-Lloyd 's four ships of the Hamburg Express class as well as two ships of Mitsui OSK Lines , three Ships of the Ben Line and four ships of Nippon Yusen Kaisha served the joint Europe-Asia service of the newly founded trio group.
The ships of the OCL had a green hull, which was closed at the top with a white area. The superstructures were also white, the chimney green, and marked with the white OCL logo. Although the names of the OCL ships ended in Bay , subsidiaries such as Australia-Japan Container Line deviated from this rule and named their ships, for example, Arafura or Aotea . When the OCL became P & OCL, the appearance of the ships changed so that the hulls were completely green and the funnel was given a P&O logo. The naming of the acquired ships was retained even after the sale to Maersk in June 2006.