For those who contract to carry or arrange for the carriage of goods from Birmingham, England to Birmingham, Albama, the letters “TCM” convey an almost mystical significance. Transports Combinés de Marchandises is the title of a draft convention on liability for intermodal transport which finally died at the United Nations Container Conference in 1972.

TCM was largely conceived within commercial circles as an answer to some of the problems for cargo liability posed by developing trends in cargo handling — particularly containerisation. Whereas separate international conventions established the rules to apply in respect of loss or damage to goods carried by sea, air, road or rail, no standard regime existed to cover liability for cases of combined transport — cases in which it might not even be known in advance by the parties what mode of transport would be used.

The need felt by commerce was for optional international rules which would provide standard conditions of contract for the CT document under which goods would move direct from Worcester to Wisconsin. A standard document would, broadly speaking, have been intended to achieve two objectives.

In the first place, standardisation was a useful goal in itself — no one, whether carrier, shipper or underwriter, really appreciated a situation in which the terms of carriage for CT documents varied with every new entrant into the business. A second objective however was based on the belief that an inter-governmental convention would enable CT documents to achieve the status of negotiability, or more accurately, bankability. Commerce wanted CT documents (or CT bills of lading as they have been more usually described — particularly by shipowner Combined Transport Operators) to be regarded with as much respect as the traditional ocean bill of lading by the banks, who would be asked to lend money on their strength.

With these objectives in mind, the draft TCM Convention was evolved, initially by the Comité Maritime International and later within the UN fora of the Inter-Governmental Maritime Consultative Organisation (IMCO) and the Economic Commission for Europe (ECE). The culmination of this work was to be the adoption of a legal instrument at the 1972 Container Conference. This never happened. Politics, never far from the UN arena, led the developing countries to oppose further development of the convention.