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This article is largely based on the surviving records of two Scottish tramp shipping firms, Hugh Hogarth & Sons and Lyle Shipping, the former privately owned throughout its history and the latter later a public company. It traces their birth and growth up to what became, after 1958 when ocean freight rates dropped, an increasingly difficult operational environment for British shipping firms dealing with increased international competition, political and economic volatility and financial pressures. As family owners died, chartered accountants increasingly took control of company boards to negotiate credit terms, arrange loans and overdrafts, and to chase tax-free allowances and investment grants from governments. In this regard, Hogarth and Lyle were no different to other British shipping companies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The transition from sail to steam had more profound effects than any other development in the recorded history of merchant shipping. In combination with iron and steel hulls, steam power enabled ships to become larger, more reliable and more efficient, with far reaching effects on the shipping industry and world trade. But the question has rarely been asked, did the change make ships safer? This was of immediate concern to those working aboard the ships, but also to those who operated, financed, employed and insured them. It might be expected that an iron or steel hull, propelled independently of wind and tide, would be in less danger from accidental loss than a wooden ship largely at the mercy of the elements, but evidence is largely lacking. This paper reports a survey comparing the loss rates of sailing and steam-powered vessels in the British coastal bulk trades, where sail and steam were doing similar work in the same geographical setting. Although steam vessels were marginally safer, the difference in rates of loss are not as great as expected, and reasons for this are discussed, with particular focus on those who worked aboard them or had a financial or commercial interest. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Currently, elements of ship procurement such as stores, lubricants, manning and various regulatory obligations represent a considerable amount of daily running costs. Specifically, ship provision decision-making consists of many uncertainties and a wide number of decision parameters due to the regional price and product quality differences. The primary objective of this study is to establish a decision support system for provision decision-making process. In order to achieve this, a policy management algorithm framework integrating the Delphi Technique (DT) and the Hesitant Fuzzy Set (HFS) approach was established. In the Delphi process, a survey was distributed to a group of experts from regional shipping companies. The overall consensus revealed that ship location, company policy, and inventory of products could be determined as the main decision-criteria consisting of various attributes which are expressed with linguistic terms. In order to transform linguistics terms to numerical values, the HFS was applied. This integrated methodological framework was also applied to selected case studies of two ships. It was found that it would be possible to reduce daily provision cost per crew from $10.36 to $8.24 and from $16.16 to $11.64, and to save, respectively, $19717.45 and $7404.45 within 453 and 470 days for given ships. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Maritime transportation is one of the most capital-intensive industries. Fleet planning is vital but challenging to shipowners because the industry is extremely volatile. Relatively few papers have studied strategic fleet planning in tramp shipping, which is intertwined with contract analysis and different from that in industrial or liner shipping. This article develops a mixed-integer programming model, and it is the first of its kind that jointly optimizes strategic fleet planning and the selections of long-term and spot contracts in tramp shipping. The model can be used to determine the best mix of long-term and spot contracts for a given fleet and/or to find the optimal fleet size and mix for a set of contracts. It can be used as a basis for a fleet renewal programme, informing decisions on when to sell, whether to buy old or new ships, and when to charter in or out vessels. A numerical example is given to illustrate how to use the model to evaluate different operations strategies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper considers a class of cargo ship routing and scheduling problems from industrial and tramp shipping and presents a wide range of benchmark instances that have been created to represent realistic planning problems for various shipping segments. Initial results for the benchmark instances are provided both through exact and heuristic methods. Optimal solutions to smaller problem instances are provided by a commercial mixed-integer programming solver, and high-quality solutions to larger problem instances are provided by a state-of-the-art adaptive large neighborhood search heuristic. The provided benchmark instances, as well as an instance generator, intend to stimulate future development of solution algorithms for this important planning problem, and to provide a basis for modelling and solving various real-life problem extensions that go beyond what is included in the benchmark instances. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The merchant steamship market in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was dominated by the UK shipbuilding industry but past studies have portrayed a market characterized by the strong relationships between UK shipbuilders and shipowners where competition between firms was the exception rather than the rule. The objective of this article is to shed new light on this market by drawing on UK shipbuilding and shipping records to examine four characteristics that indicate the intensity of competition for new orders from 1889-1914: customer concentration, firms' business strategies, sales activities and price negotiation. Overall a market is revealed with many examples of shipbuilders deploying a high level of sales and marketing expertise which contributed both to the success of individual firms and to the UK shipbuilding industry as a whole. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The purpose of this paper is to solve a planning problem faced by many shipping companies dealing with the transport of bulk products. These shipping companies are committed to carrying some contract cargoes and will try to derive additional revenue from optional spot cargoes. An efficient tabu search algorithm has been developed to ensure quick decision support for the planners. The solutions generated by the tabu search heuristic are compared with those produced by a previously published multi-start local search heuristic. Computational results show that the tabu search heuristic yields optimal or near-optimal solutions to real-life instances within reasonable time. For large and tigthly constrained cases, the tabu search heuristic provides much better solutions than the multi-start local search heuristic. A version of the tabu search heuristic will be integrated as an improved solver in a prototype decision support system used by several shipping companies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Here, we describe a real planning problem in the tramp shipping industry. A tramp shipping company may have a certain amount of contract cargoes that it is committed to carry, and tries to maximize the profit from optional cargoes. For real long-term contracts, the sizes of the cargoes are flexible. However, in previous research within tramp ship routing, the cargo quantities are regarded as fixed. We present an MP-model of the problem and a set partitioning approach to solve the multi-ship pickup and delivery problem with time windows and flexible cargo sizes. The columns are generated a priori and the most profitable ship schedule for each cargo set-ship combination is included in the set partitioning problem. We have tested the method on several real-life cases, and the results show the potential economical effects for the tramp shipping companies by utilizing flexible cargo sizes when generating the schedules. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article analyzes tramp shipping firms and attempts to provide an insight into its organization, structure and entrepreneurial methods through a comparative perspective, to identify continuity and change that will enhance the understanding of the successful path of British and Greek tramp operators over a similar and different periods of time. The tramp shipping firm lies in the middle of three interactive networks: the regional, the national and the international. Tramp shipping companies, international by their nature, share many characteristics with international trading companies. Knowledge, information and human relationships often proved the ownership advantages of service sector firms. In endeavoring to present a typology of the tramp shipping company, we can distinguish two periods, pre-World War II and post-World War II. In the first half of the twentieth century, the tramp shipping operators fell into two categories: the cross-traders, like the Greeks, and the national traders, like the British. In the second half of the twentieth century, tramp shipping was transformed in response to the need to adapt to the changes dictated by international trade. It is evident that the organization, structure and entrepreneurial methods of British and Greek tramp shipping have followed a similar paths and have shared common characteristics that have contributed to their success for a large part of the period from mid-nineteenth century to the present day.

It is informed that the original railway Acts allowed for price discrimination in two ways. There was discrimination between commodities, based on their market value, the more valuable commodities attracting higher rates per ton per mile; and there was a fairly rudimentary acceptance of the idea that unit costs would fall as distance traveled increased and that, therefore, there ought to be lower mileage rates for traffic on long hauls. In the early 1870s, it was estimated that three-fifths of all railway rates were influenced by sea competition, and the pressure of that competition increased a great deal over the next 40 years, as shipping costs fell. Tramp shipping rates came down by over 40 percent between the early 1879s and the late 1880s, and continued to fall steadily for the next twenty years, putting considerable downward pressure on railway rates. It was in the period after 1870 in particular, that the disparity between the rates which the railways offered on agricultural traffic coming into the ports and those available on domestic agricultural traffic became most obvious.