The short answer
Not here. A container carries no AIS transmitter, so it never shows up on a ship tracking map by itself. The ship that carries it does. Find out which ship has your box and you can watch her cross the water on Shiptrail.
What a ship tracker cannot show you is the box itself: which stack it is in, or whether it was loaded at all. For that you want the carrier's own website, which can tell you where the box is on land and at the terminal. The rest of this page is about joining the two up.
How to find the ship
Start with the paperwork. Your booking, or the bill of lading, names the ship that is meant to carry the box. The carrier's own website, which usually lets you look up a container number, shows where the box is on land and at the terminal, and it may give the ship's name as well.
Then search for the ship's name on Shiptrail. Many ships share a name, so if you can find her IMO number on your booking, type that instead: MMSI, IMO and call signs says why. Her card shows where she is and where she is bound, and How to track a ship takes you through the rest.
If you type the container number into the search box, it will tell you what it is: "That looks like a container number", and that Shiptrail tracks ships, not containers. It is a friendlier answer than a plain "no ship found", but it still wants the ship's name.
What a container number is
A container number is four letters followed by seven digits, like ABCU 234567 7, which is made up. The first three letters are the owner code, which names the owner or principal operator of the container. The fourth is U, J or Z: U for freight containers, J for detachable equipment that goes with them, and Z for trailers and chassis. Then come six digits that the owner chooses, and a last digit, the seventh, which is a check digit that catches a typing mistake. The standard behind all of this is ISO 6346.
The letters name the owner, not the ship, so they will not tell you which ship the box is on. Shiptrail's box calls anything in this shape a container number, even when the last digit does not match, because a mistyped digit is still a container number.
Why a box can change ships
A box does not always stay on one ship. At a hub port, containers are taken off and transferred to another ship to reach their destinations, which is called transhipment. So the ship on your booking may be the first of two or three, and not the last. If your box seems to be somewhere that ship is not, check the carrier's website for the ship it names now.
What Shiptrail can tell you, and what it cannot
What Shiptrail adds is the ship's side of the story: where she is now, which port she is bound for, and when she left the last one. Her card shows her position, speed and course. Her page has a Voyage part that says where she left from, where she is bound and when she expects to arrive, and its Recent voyages say when she left each port. A destination and an arrival time are typed in by the crew, so they can be out of date.
What it cannot tell you is which stack the box is in, whether it was loaded, or whether it is still aboard. And a ship far from a coast is out of range of the receivers on land, so a ship in the middle of an ocean can be missing from the map for days. Why a ship disappears says more. Positions are not for navigation.
Questions people ask
- Can I track a container by its number?
- Not on Shiptrail. Ask the carrier's own website where the box is, and ask Shiptrail where the ship is.
- Why does the number not find a ship?
- Because a container number is not a ship's number. The box has no transmitter, and the letters at the front of the number name its owner. The search box knows the shape and says so. What it wants is the ship's name, her IMO number or her MMSI.
- What is a bill of lading?
- The document a carrier, or its agent, issues to acknowledge that it has received your cargo for shipment. Yours, or your booking, names the ship that is meant to carry the box.