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Originally Posted by someone123
It is interesting but I have seen these stories for decades, not much major stuff has happened, and in the end I wonder how much economic significance the container shipping really has.
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Container shipping is massive and unfortunately Halifax is still small potatoes compared to other east coast container ports like NY/NJ, Charleston, Savannah, Norfolk and Jacksonville. Those have seen considerable growth over the last decade or so with the Panama Canal being expanded to allow for trans-Pacific ships to travel to the east coast more readily and avoid the US west coast ports that are perpetually congested with ships from China.
Halifax's problem has always been CN. Regardless of the source of the cargo, containers arriving here are usually not destined for the large consumer markets of NY/Philadelphia, Chicago, Atlanta and the like. The stuff that is mostly has its origin in Europe and is relatively small volumes compared to sources in Asia. Getting those containers out of Halifax to even Toronto and Montreal has always been an issue, and getting them to Chicago is an even bigger headache because of CN's infrequent and slow service to those cities. I remember seeing a study a couple of decades ago that indicated that while a train from Halifax to Chicago was a relatively short and straight line on a map, the actual infrastructure either did not exist through the NE US or was in such poor condition that it was essentially unusable. That meant cargo had to go from here to Toronto by rail and then find its way to Chicago to access the midwest markets, a slow and expensive undertaking. For a long time we had one train a week leaving here for points west which was a real bottleneck. I don't know if that has changed. But in any event, the cargo going through here is largely attributable to just a handful of carriers and is a mere fraction of what gets handled by the large US ports who now handle most of the China traffic. It makes little sense for them to call here a few days later than when they could access those US east coast ports, then have to have the cargo wait here for a CN train. What we see in Halifax is mostly stuff intended for the relatively small Eastern Canada markets.
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