The potential for making cost effective and energy efficient liner shipping networks using OR is huge and neglected. We believe access to domain knowledge and data is an entry barrier to approach the liner shipping network design problem. The purpose of the benchmark suite project is to provide access to the liner shipping domain for independent OR researchers. We present the domain of liner shipping in relation to mathematical programming. An IP model and a suite of instances based on real life data from the largest liner shipping company, Maersk Line, and several other stakeholders is presented. Finally, computational results yielding the first solutions to the benchmark suite are presented.