The most important thing in the container terminal is to handle the cargo effectively in the limited time. To achieve this object, many strategies have been introduced and applied to. If we consider the automated container terminal, it is necessary that the cargo handling equipments are equipped with more intelligent control systems. From the middle of the 1990's, an automated rail-mounted gantry crane(RMGC) and rubber-tired gantry crane(RTG) have been developed and widely used to handle containers in the yards. Recently, in these cranes, the many equipments like CCD cameras and sensors are mounted to cope with the automated terminal environment. In this paper, we try to support the development of more intelligent automated cranes which make the cargo handling be performed effectively in the yards. For this plant, the modelling, tracking control, anti-sway system design, skew motion suppressing and complicated motion control and suppressing problems must be considered. In this paper, the system modelling and a tracking control approach are discussed. And, we design the tracking control system incorporating an observer based on the 2DOF servosystem design approach to obtain the informations of the states. The experiment results show the usefulness of the designed control system.