In search of a problem

New words acquired via studio reading: a couple of intermodal transportation schemes that don’t appear to have moved beyond the coinage of cutesy names: fishyback and birdyback.

Fishyback service is named by analogy with piggyback service, and consists of carrying loaded truck trailers on boats or barges. The top search results that aren’t definitions are newspaper clippings from the 1950s—and the textbooks where I read about it in the first place. Perhaps the transportation scheme was pushed aside in favor of the containerized shipping that we know today. I did find an Egyptian shipping company that advertises the service.

Birdyback intermodal transportation is the same idea, but with the trailer carried by a cargo plane. Presumably in the cargo hold, not Space Shuttle-style.