(cheerful music) - Some of the freight cars passing here are ones I remember from my train set as a kid: hopper cars, tank cars, gondolas, but many are a kind of car I wouldn't have recognized back then, something called a well car, carrying shipping containers, like these at the CSX container yard in Bedford Park next to Midway Airport.

Containers can be transferred from ships to trains to trucks without their contents being unloaded until they reach their final destinations.

It's called intermodal shipping.

You look around your house, and you just think about everything in your house.

How much of that came on containers?

- Probably 99.9% of it.

- [Geoffrey] Tiretta Stribling is the senior terminal manager here, and this is just one of 19 intermodal terminals in the Chicago area.

So what's in these containers?

- It's the everyday things that we need.

Tissue, garbage bags, paper towel, your furniture.

I mean, we even do cars, like Teslas.

- Now the fun part.

Ugh.

Hi Charlie.

- Hi.

- Charlie Morgan took me for a ride on his rubber wheel gantry crane, five stories tall and six containers wide, to show us how containers go from trains to trucks.

Going up.

(machine whirring) - Normally we would try to work from one end to the other.

That's the most efficient way to do it.

So I have to put all four of those corners into these holes.

- Look at that.

You gotta get it all lined up.

- [Charlie] The lights tell me when I'm in the box, and I can lock it and pick it up.

- [Geoffrey] Oh man, here it goes.

I kind of felt that.

- Yeah, it's a lot of weight.

- Do you know how much that thing weighs?

- [Charlie] Estimate 40,000 pounds.

That would be an average.

- 20 tons.

So it's going down onto this chassis now?

- [Charlie] Yeah.

- So how good are you at parallel parking your car?

(Charlie laughs) - Pretty good, I guess.

(Geoffrey laughs) If I can drive this, I could probably drive anything with wheels.

(pensive music) - [Geoffrey] With trains nearly three miles long, you need a lot of trucks to haul away all those containers.

So how many truck drivers come in and out of here every day?

- Oh, we can have between 2,000 to 3,800 a day.

- And what are the working hours here?

- We're a 24-hour operation, usually seven days a week.

The only time that we're closed is Christmas Day.

- So you're not Scrooge?

- No.

- Each container is tracked by computer, so workers know which train to load them on and where on the train to place them.

So have you always wanted to be a railroader?

- My father was a freight conductor.

My grandfather was an engineer.

My brother was a yard master.

- That's really common in this industry, isn't it?

That it's- - Yeah, it is.

- Hereditary.

(pensive music)