editorial comment l
ShD Promoting excellence in Editor
Peter MacLeod
petermacleod@quartzltd.com 01895 454452
Publishing & Exhibitions Director Rob Fisher
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Advertisement Sales Christine Attew
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Advertisement Sales Joel Martin
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Production Margi Liberman
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Managing Director Paul R. Michael
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©2011 Quartz Publishing & Exhibitions Ltd. All rights reserved. ISSN: 0039-1832
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I
t’s been a pretty hectic month at ShD towers, what with site visits and holidays cutting into the working week. Most interesting of my excursions was a trip to Felixstowe, to take a close look at Europe’s biggest container port, which is undergoing a radical makeover to enable it to play host to the largest class of ships.
When I was much younger, and lived in nearby Ipswich, I used to play amongst the ruins of a Napoleonic War relic we knew as Dooley fort. This structure, alas, lives on in name alone, as the Dooley terminal now sits where the castle once was. It must have been around then that it entered into my consciousness just how large Felixstowe docks was becoming. Whilst other ports around the UK coast were dominated by the unions and strangled by restrictive work practices, Felixstowe - a hitherto small port handling mainly bulk grain and other agricultural products - was able to embrace the concept of containerisation.
Felixstowe grew and grew, up to the point where it currently abuts its maximum outer perimeter limits. Many of my friends went there after leaving school, some of them to rise up the ladder, stick at it and subsequently make a fortune, others to quit for what they perceived as more glamourous pastures and later to regret they weren’t part of the phenomenal growth at this east coast port. The other pleasure from my younger years was to drive to the other side of the complex, to the public viewing point at Languard, and watch with my dad the big ships come in and discharge their cargo. (A little later in life, I would drive there at night and line up my Mk1 Escort in a line of similarly steamed-up vehicles, but that’s another story for another magazine!)
So, leaving my mis-spent youth behind and getting back to last month’s visit, what a thrill it was to get right up close to witness at first hand the complexity of getting one of these massive vessels berthed, and then loaded/unloaded. The dexterity at which the materials handling equipment is deployed, the logistics of moving all those boxes around, the efficiency of the operation... I was taken aback.
Read all about it in next month’s ShD. In the meantime, I hope you enjoy this issue, and please get in touch with your comments. ●
Peter MacLeod Editor
logistics and materials handling
comment
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