Crating and export crates in Chicago

The country's railroad crossroads

Chicago is where the major North American freight railroads meet. BNSF, Union Pacific, CSX, Norfolk Southern, Canadian National and CPKC all work here, and containers and trailers are lifted between trains at intermodal ramps across the metro. A box that leaves a plant in Joliet can be on a train to the West Coast the same week, or be trucked to the East Coast.

On the road, I-90, I-94, I-55, I-80, I-57 and I-290 run in and out of the city, and the tollways ring it. O'Hare is the principal cargo airport, with Midway smaller, and Chicago Rockford International lies northwest of the metro and handles freighter flights.

Water at the edge of the city

Chicago is also a port. Lake Michigan reaches the Port of Chicago at Calumet Harbor on the south side, and ocean-going vessels can come through the St. Lawrence Seaway during the open season. The Chicago Sanitary and Ship Canal and the Illinois River connect the city to the Mississippi for barge traffic. Heavy or oversize machinery, which is awkward on a truck, often uses barge for part of its route.

The Great Lakes freeze in winter and the Seaway closes for part of the year, so a shipper planning a lake or Seaway route should say so early in the quote request.

What Chicago makes

Chicago is known for machinery of every kind: packaging and food-processing lines, machine tools, electrical and power equipment, rail equipment, steel products, medical devices and the controls that tie them together. The suburbs and the outer ring, from Elk Grove Village to Aurora to Joliet, hold a dense set of machine shops and fabricators.

The loads range from small precision assemblies to multi-ton press components. A crating order list from one plant can include a hundred identical small crates and one that is eighteen feet long.

• Packaging lines: modular skid-base crates, labelled by section
• Electrical switchgear: sheathed crates, roof drip edge, tip indicators
• Machine tools: heavy crates with strongback and lag-bolted base
• Medical devices: clean, sheathed crates with desiccant

Rail loading and the crate

Rail shipments use ramps, lashing and, sometimes, a single hump in a yard. The crate must stay together through slack action as couplings take up. Blocking and bracing inside the crate prevent the load from shifting, and the skid must take lashing at several points. For a rail-loaded container, the crate fits within the door with room for the forklift.

We ask for the equipment type if you know it. If the crate will ride on a flat car, say so, and the base and top are built to take tie-downs.

Overseas from Chicago

Containers from the metro leave for East Coast, Gulf and West Coast ports by rail, and on arrival cross the quay to a ship. Wood packaging for overseas destinations commonly needs the IPPC stamp on HT lumber; plywood is exempt, according to NELMA. Check the destination country's rule with APHIS and the receiving plant-protection authority.

Keep the crate's marks plain. Handling pictograms from ISO 780, the gross weight and a centre-of-gravity mark do more good than a paragraph of text.

Delivery across the Chicago region

Crates are built to order and delivered to the shipper's dock throughout the Chicago region, from the Loop's industrial edge to the western and southern suburbs and northwest Indiana. We have no facility or yard of our own in the metro. A knockdown kit suits plants that crate on a busy floor and want the panels staged beside the load.

Include the dock's door height and whether trucks back in or sit at a leveller.

Press components and oversize loads

Large presses, rolls and frames from Illinois plants are often too wide or tall for a standard trailer once crated. The carrier needs a permit, and the permit depends on the crate's outside dimensions, so we confirm those before building. If the piece can be split at a bolted joint, two moderate crates move more easily than one huge one.

Crane lifting at a rail ramp or a barge dock needs sling points on the strongback, and the roof must not carry load from a spreader beam. We mark both on the crate.

What a Chicago quote should include

Send the inside dimensions of the load in inches, its gross weight in pounds and the destination country. Tell us how many crates, by when, and which mode is planned: rail, truck, air or water.

If you ship the same product weekly, say so. A standing spec on file shortens every order after the first, and the crates match.