New Westminster’s largest port terminal, Pacific Coast Terminals, was built in 1929. For the next 40 years, this busy terminal helped generate economic prosperity and was part of a booming industrial sector in New Westminster. But by the 1970s it was obsolete. Why?

The short answer is globalization. Globalization in the shipping industry meant larger ships and near universal use of shipping containers to hold manufactured goods. The terminals in New Westminster were simply too small to accommodate shipping containers. But in the 1960s, even before containers became so popular, terminal operators in New Westminster began to find that their warehouses were too small to hold enough cargo to fill the holds of the larger ships. Because space was at a minimum, longshoremen remember that they sometimes moved products directly from trains onto the ships. The New Westminster (later Fraser River) Harbour Commission opened Fraser Surrey Docks as an expansion of the New Westminster terminals in 1964. It added a container terminal there ten years later. While containers are still handled at Fraser Surrey Docks, Deltaport, which opened in 1997, is the busiest terminal for containerized cargo bound for Canada’s west coast.

Now with the big gantry [cranes] we have, everything is automatic... From the day I started, it was all hand-stow work. Now there's very little hand stow. Machinery, containers, it's all just mechanized now. 
-RON NOULLETT, retired 502 longshoreman

There were always big ships down there. It is still kind of weird to drive down there and not see any big ships. Growing up, that was just commonplace, there were always ships. 
-KATHLEEN LANGSTROTH, New Westminster resident

I think the Fraser supports New Westminster, or it did all those years. I'm kinda sad to see there's no more berths in New Westminster. Everything's across the river now or in Annacis.  It's too bad... What does New Westminster do now? What have they got? Not much. 
-EUGENE DUTOUR, retired Local 502 longshoreman