W. Bruce Seaton assembled experts from all surface modes to explore intermodalism.

Bringing It All Together

Many consumers are aware that the products they purchase come from other parts of the world, but few realize the role that intermodalism — the seamless movement of containerized goods using different modes of transport like ships, trains, and trucks — plays in the availability of just about everything from jeans to personal computers.

Transportation providers like APL are making the connection between sea and land with split-second precision. And this ability to manage time-sensitive shipments permits today’s giant retailers to bring such a broad range of products to the public.

In fact, a recent transportation industry report asserted that the impact of intermodalism on the global economy has been greater than that of the U.S. space program of the 1960s. And it all began when the interdisciplinary team assembled by Bruce Seaton in the early 1980s pioneered stacktrain technology.

The stacktrain made intermodalism a reality in North America.

In just 15 years, intermodalism has had a tremendous impact. In earlier eras, the movement of cargo was a slow, often-delayed process. Today, the world’s vast intermodal network supports an environment in which shipments are in almost perpetual motion.

The result has been a significant increase in the volume of shipments moving through this efficient system and a world-wide rise in commercial activity. Here’s an example of the incredible scale of this new era in global commerce:

APL’s largest containerships — numbering almost 50 — transport hundreds of thousands of shipments. The most commonly used container, which is 40 feet long, eight feet high, and eight feet wide can hold:

Bringing it all together: Global Gateway North, APL’s ultra-efficient intermodal terminal in Seattle.

• 1,000 cases of bananas
• 16,500 boxes of running shoes
• 132,000 videotapes
• 25,000 blouses

Imagine a ship just over three football fields long that carries over 2,400 forty-foot containers — that’s 4 million boxes of shoes!

These huge ships are loaded and discharged at state-of-the-art terminals, where thousands of containers of valuable commodities are then efficiently transferred to dockside trains that carry them to myriad destinations throughout North America — and ultimately to today’s consumers.

In a sense, the revolution in cargo handling that began in the 1950s with the advent of the container has come full circle. A simple idea has grown into the complex, world-wide intermodal network delivers the many products we all use nearly every day.