Ever think of where a lot of your containers on the well cars come from. Granted, some are generated by local business and longhauled over the road to final destinations within the USA. But most come by ship from overseas, unloaded at a port, transferred to railcars and moved inland. Logos like Evergreen, President Lines, Maersk, frequent the hiways every day. Ships that are too big to transit the Panma Canal, offload on the west coast, and mini land bridge was started, the huge container trains. Soon, with the expansion of the canal, larger ships can reach the east coast, cutting back on some of the rail traffic. Also a new port on the west coast of Mexico is being built to rival US Ports.<br />East coast ports are expanding, dredging channels, and raising bridges, and increasing tunnel heights to allow the double stacked rail cars.<br />This tug barge unit represents the "Early" container days. The idea of a dedicated "Notch" ITB was to reduce the number of crews required by Coast Guard on "Feeder" coastwise ships. They would go up and down the coast and load export or MT containers bound overseas at a larger loading port, and deliver the imported cargoes. Many of the smaller ports did not have huge container cranes so the barge was self loading/ unloading. Today, most ports have loading facilities, so the barges are not required to carry massive cranes, but the containers off loaded in major ports are still barged, trucked, or trained, to their destinations.<br />This model will eventually find it's home in my port facility, a reason for all the container cars. :-)<br />Fred