Caterpillar Marine - Marine Engines Caterpillar

two or three decades could not have
occurred, or in any case not at the pace
it did. The success of this revolution and
in particular the ongoing development
has been very much due to the shipbuilding
industry, as it was responsible
for designing the boxes linking the
continents, without which the changes
in the transport world have been inconceivable.
German shipyards played a
significant part in this process.
First of all, it is probably true to say
that the containership has undergone
a more rapid and volatile development
than any other type of vessel in
the long history of global shipbuilding.
It began after some more or less hesitant
preliminaries with the enormous
increase in ship sizes between the
second half of the 1960s and the beginning
of the 1970s. The vessels ordered
in 1967 for the North Atlantic service
became known as the first generation
with 14,000 grt and 750 TEU capacity.
In 1969, orders were placed for ships
of the second generation for the Austral
service with 27,000 grt and 1,500
TEU, followed only a year later by vessels
of the third generation with 55,000
grt and 3,000 TEU for Far East services.
Ship sizes and capacities thus quadrupled
within the space of four years.
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Shipbuilders were confronted with
the special problem that the containership
was an entirely new type of vessel
and that the enormous size increases
had to be mastered in the individual
generations without any time remaining
to gain experience with the previous
ones. Problems concerning, for
instance, spaces between containers,
tolerances or effective lashing equipment
had to be solved largely theoretically.
However, shipbuilders coped
very quickly and admirably with all
these challenges. That applied particularly,
but not only, for the German shipbuilding
industry, first and foremost for
Blohm + Voss, Bremer Vulkan, which
later met such a miserable end, and
Howaldtswerke-Deutsche Werft AG
(HDW) or their predecessor companies.
In the mid-1970s, it was then generally
accepted that in the foreseeable
future the sector would be unlikely to
see either a fourth containership generation
or one with nuclear propulsion,
or any submarine containership
or container airship for that matter –
all projects that were more or less seriously
discussed at that time. The technical
development seemed to have
come to a halt. Standardised rectangular
boxes had to be transported, and
that was that. What other major steps
would be necessary? The limit to further
increases in ship sizes was set by
the Panama Canal, through which 3,000
TEU vessels could just pass. „The limits
to reasonable growth have become
clear after the great strides made in the
past ten years,“ it was stated for example
in 1977.
Further progress after
apparent standstill
Following the enormous growth in
the size of containerships up to the
early 1970s as noted, for a long time
there seemed to be little debate outside
narrow expert circles concerning the
further development of the containership,
although it should be pointed out
that there was never really any technical
standstill at any time, even if this
appeared to be superficially the case.
Progress made during the next ten
to 15 years involved mainly constant
design optimisation and became particularly
evident with the ever increas-
With the increasing size of containerships
for overseas transport, seaborne
distribution from major ports is handled
by ever larger feeder vessels.