Trolley and lift van
Encyclopedia
The trolley
Trolley (horse-drawn)
Among horse-drawn vehicles, a trolley was a goods vehicle with a platform body with four small wheels of equal size, mounted underneath it, the front two on a turntable undercarriage. The wheels were rather larger and the deck proportionately higher than those of a lorry...

was a platform body with four relatively small wheels mounted underneath it, the front two on a turntable undercarriage. It was drawn by a pair of horses and the driver's seat was mounted on the headboard.

The lift van was a sturdy wooden box 11 feet 6 inches (3.5 m)to 17 feet (5.2 m) long, 6 ft 3in (1.9 m) wide and 6 ft 6 in (2 m) high to the centre of the roof. It had two wrought iron straps passing down the sides and under the bottom, having a sling shackled to holes in the top ends of the straps so that the whole and its contents could be lifted by crane onto the trolley for movement by road, onto a railway truck or into the hold of a ship. It was therefore a logical step on from the pantechnicon van
Pantechnicon van
A Pantechnicon van, currently usually shortened to pantechnicon, was originally a furniture removal van drawn by horses and used by the British company "The Pantechnicon" for delivering and collecting furniture which its customers wished to store...

 in the development of containerization
Containerization
Containerization is a system of freight transport based on a range of steel intermodal containers...

.

The system thereby provided a means of door-to-door transit and was used particularly for furniture removals. The furniture makers and merchants, Maple and Co., in particular, used it to deliver between their depôts in London and Paris.

It was also used for the carriage of meat
Meat
Meat is animal flesh that is used as food. Most often, this means the skeletal muscle and associated fat and other tissues, but it may also describe other edible tissues such as organs and offal...

. In this case, the lift van had a double floor, roof and walls with insulating material such as cork and a layer of paper between the cork and each skin. The insulation thickness was about 2 inches in the floor and five elsewhere.

The earliest note by the Oxford English Dictionary is a reference by the Baltimore Sun in 1955, comparing the advantages of "lift-on, lift-off service involving only a truck van" with those of "roll on-roll off". However, this would appear to relate to the modern form of container while using old terminology.
The source of this article is wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.  The text of this article is licensed under the GFDL.
 
x
OK