United States Lines would achieve what it took to succeed in container shipping: scale. Scale was the holy grail of the maritime industry by the late 1970s. Bigger ships lowered the cost of carrying each container. Bigger ports with bigger cranes lowered the cost of handling each ship. Bigger containers—the 20-foot box, shippers’ favorite in the ea

The railroads were in the happy situation of being able to pass their lower costs on to customers and still earn better profits than they did carrying freight the traditional way, in boxcars. Freight forwarders took advantage of the rate difference, arranging to consolidate smaller shipments into full carloads, for which they could demand lower rai

Making the switch to alternatives would do us a lot of good; because shipping alone accounts for 3 percent of all emissions, using clean fuels would give us a meaningful reduction. Unfortunately, the fuel that container ships run on—it’s called bunker fuel—is dirt cheap, because it’s made from the dregs of the oil-refining process. Since their curr

change how wine is moved