deugro delivers drum sections to Golbey in multimodal project

Voith Paper engaged deugro’s team more than two and a half years before the transport was scheduled for its Golbey PM1 project. It required close collaboration from deugro’s teams in Germany, China, Belgium and France.

The drums measured up to 32 m x 5.6 m x 5.7 m and weighed up to 195 tonnes. To determine the most suitable routing, dteq Transport Engineering Solutions and several local partners performed several route surveys, including turning simulations and swept path analyses.

The cargoes were moved from the port of Shanghai to the Port of Antwerp onboard dship’s heavy lift vessel Annie, shipped on a last-in/first-out basis. The components were discharged onto the quay, allowing deugro to assemble and mount a cable guiding system onto the drums prior to loading on to a river vessel.

From Antwerp, the cargoes were moved along inland waterways to the river port of Frouard in France. Then various trailer configurations were deployed to deliver the components to the jobsite in Golbey.

“The most challenging part of the journey was the manoeuvring through the many traffic circles and tight turns, as well as traversing the town of Lunéville. To allow for the safe navigation through the extremely sharp turns in Lunéville, we arranged the transfer from conventional THP heavy-duty trailers to SPMTs using a jacking/stooling operation,” explained Ambra Gotsch, project coordinator at deugro Germany.

“After crossing the most critical turns in the city, the cargo was transferred back onto the THP trailers for the remaining on-carriage.”

 Ulf Langner, project manager operations at deugro Germany, added: “Another operational challenge was the passing of a railway bridge near the Village of Méhoncourt. Six additional axle lines had to be mounted to the modular trailer to stay within the allowable bridge capacity determined by the road authorities, then dismantled after passing the bridge.”