May 8 - Switzerland headquartered Toggenburger claims to have used the two largest cranes available in the country - its Terex CC 2400-1 and CC 2500-1 lattice boom crawler cranes - to lift an 884-tonne bridge span in Schafisheim.
"The individual bridge components had enormous gross weights of up to 275 tonnes and required us to use working radii of up to 29 m, which made it absolutely necessary to use the largest crawler cranes available in all of Switzerland," said André Huber, Toggenburger's project manager.
Then cranes were initially transported to the Swiss project site using 48 trucks. Toggenburger spent two days erecting the cranes, despite limited available space and the fact that delivery operations at the premises continued around them.
For the lifts, the seven-person team set up the CC 2400-1 crane with an SSL configuration featuring a main boom length of 48 m, a counterweight of 160 tonnes, a central ballast of 40 tonnes, and an SL counterweight of 240 tonnes.
The CC 2500-1 crane was configured almost identically. The only difference was that the SL counterweight for the CC 2500-1 weighed 250 tonnes. A 130-tonne capacity crane was used as an assist crane.
The bridge was delivered to the project site as individual components, which were then welded together to form seven large bridge sections. These elements were then positioned on the bridge's three piers in five individual lifts.
"This required an extraordinary level of precision, since the tolerances for joining the individual elements were a matter of millimeters," explains Toggenburger's Michael Dudler.
