ABSTRACT
This chapter concerns charting the institutional development of rail-based sea container transport in Britain. Essentially, it is the story of a single enterprise, Freightliner. This subsidiary of the nationalised British railway corporation, the British Railways Board (BRB), was established in 1965. The initiative came only two years after the Board itself had been created, following the break-up of the British Transport Commission (BTC), which had presided over the whole of post-war nationalised transport since 1947. The tentative conclusion here is that the railways' competitive advantage was limited not only by investment constraints and pricing weaknesses, but also by technical changes, such as the growing popularity of 40-foot containers, and the introduction of larger, heavier lorries in the UK. Larger containers have had a deleterious impact on the railways' route availability given the restricted loading gauge of the UK infrastructure, while making road haulage more competitive.
