Typisch bremisch Typically “Bremish”

Neustädter Hafen in Bremen
Neustädter Hafen (port) in Bremen
vending machine when he got the idea of putting the
complete truck load in a suitable packaging that can go
straight on the ship: surely load units could be stacked on
ships just like the cigarette boxes were stacked in the
vending machine. It took a while for the pioneer to put his
plans into practice. After all, the whole concept needed
not just standardised containers but also loading cranes to
lift them onto the ship and back on to the truck again afterwards.
He was surrounded by sceptics. But he bought
his own ships and got going. His sea and land transport
company enjoyed global success under the name Sea-
Land.
German premiere for the container
The first ship with 58 containers on board started oper -
ating on the American coast in 1956. Ten years later,
McLean sent the first container ship to Europe. In Germany,
it was Bremen that saw the huge potential of
container shipping: the port of Hamburg turned it down.
On 15 May 1966, McLean’s “Fairland” unloaded the first
containers in Bremen’s Überseehafen. This heralded a new
era – but in a secret, quiet fashion, attended by just a few
initiated people. It was still quite uncertain whether the
new transport system would work. Contemporary witnesses
reported that the first container was unloaded
successfully but the second crashed down after coming
loose from its fixtures. But that's just a side note.
There was no stopping the containerisation of merchandise
traffic. In 2012, Bremen’s ports handled altogether
73.6 million tonnes of general cargo, of which 65.2 million
tonnes came in containers. Altogether 84 million tonnes of
goods passed through the ports of Bremen and Bremerhaven
in 2012, with container handling breaking the six
million record with 6.1 million TEUs.
It takes ever larger ships to cope with such quantities, such
as the “Maersk Mc-Kinney Møller”, operated by the Danish
shipping company Maersk. Currently the world’s largest
container ship, Bremerhaven was the only German port
that it visited during its maiden voyage in August 2013.
The “Maersk Mc-Kinney Møller” is 400 metres long and 59
metres wide with space for 18,270 standard containers.
It is the first of altogether 20 ships of the so-called triple
E class that the world’s largest shipping company will be
putting into service by 2015. In fully loaded state it would
have a draught of 16 metres and would not get as far as
Bremerhaven, where the water at the quayside is maximum
12.6 metres deep. But the container giant had al-
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