Page 11: of Maritime Reporter Magazine (June 2024)

Back to the Drawing Board structure of these beautiful ships. In an elegant turn of game tainers on the world at large (good and bad), and how about theory, a 35 footer could, with some adjustment, ? t in a 40 a display on container homes even right inside the vessel? foot slot, but not the other way around. Worse, it was simply These is even suf? cient space on these decks to set up impossible to recon? gure the SL-7’s for 40 foot containers. a scale container logistics system, where kids can control

With ever increasing acceptance of 40 footers, the SL-7’s model cranes, ships in pools, and trains to move cargo inter- suddenly became less attractive. modally. We are talking about a train set to end all train sets,

Remarkably, in this environment Sea-Land ran the SL-7’s and indoors at that.

until the early 1980’s. Sea-Land ended up focusing on opti- These ships are remarkable event spaces that exceed the mizing these vessels for running refrigerated cargo contain- capabilities of aircraft carriers which have hangar decks, but ers for which Sea-Land managed to maintain dominance us- for the rest are very tightly packed and therefore make awk- ing 35 foot containers. ward displays. The SL-7 RO/RO were actually designed for

In the early 1980’s Sea-Land sold these vessels to the massive open internal volume.

US Government who desperately needed Sea-Lift capac- Wheelchair access? Are you kidding? It is built in, and ity. Turning these large and fast vessels into high speed RO/ with the ramps deployed, no gangways are needed.

RO’s was a no brainer. In many ways the converted SL-7’s The possibilities boggle the mind.

were even more historic, since in a number of recent wars So where should we berth a vessel like this? I am open to they moved more arms and materials than any other class suggestions, but let’s not forget that the Port of New York, of vessels. and really New Jersey, is the birthplace of Sea-Land. Any-

They have been reasonably well maintained by the US gov- where near Port Elizabeth would do it, and be deserving of ernment over the years, and now they are the only true histori- New Jersey’s status as a logistics hub. But money talks; any cal surviving vessels from the early days of containerization. other state or port that is interested?

While maintaining large ships is very expensive, the gen- erally ? ush decked arrangement of these vessels results in a

For every column I write Maritime Reporter & Engineering News much lower coating maintenance bill than an actual contain- has agreed to make a small contribution to an organization of my er ship or, say, a passenger ship, and there is plenty of space choice. For this column I select the National Maritime Historical on deck to ? t solar for interior lighting, heating and cooling.

Society, www.seahistory.org . Maybe they can provide this concept a little push.

Almost incredibly, in their present RO/RO guise, I cannot think of a better facility for displaying the hardware associ- ated with intermodal cargo movement.

The Author

On some of the decks we can display different types of van Hemmen containers, hustlers, spreaders, chassis and even railroad

Rik van Hemmen is the President of cars. On other decks there can be traditional museum dis-

Martin & Ottaway, a marine consulting plays on the history of containerization and transportation ? rm that specializes in the resolution of technical, operational and ? nancial in general. But why just stop at containerization? Why not issues.

provide displays on global economies and the effect of con-

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MR #6 (1-17).indd 11 6/6/2024 1:42:05 PM