The Box: How the Shipping Container Made the World Smaller And the World Economy Bigger (2006)
“Since the 1930s, its ships had picked up rolls of newsprint from Crown Zellerbach’s mills at Port Angeles and Camas, in Washington State, and hauled them down the coast to California. The business was reliable—until the Southern Pacific and Union Pacific railroads went after the traffic. They exempted newsprint from their general rate increases in the 1950s, and then they began to lower their rates in order to capture the cargo. To compete, the ship line had to slash its tariff for news-print f...rom $32 to $18 per ton. By 1958, Coastwise Steamship Company was near insolvency, and the Pacific coastal trade in newsprint was dead.1 As with newsprint, so with cotton and oranges, chemicals and lumber. American coastal shipping withered during the 1950s in the face of a competitive onslaught by trains and especially trucks. The number of cargo ships engaged in coastwise trade, aside from tankers, fell from 66 in 1950 to 35 in 1960, and the total tonnage of active coastal ships dropped by one-third.MoreLess
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