February 10 - Riga-Mainz has used a Liebherr LR 1600/2 crawler crane to install a massive railway bridge for Deutsche Bahn in extremely constricted conditions on a site in Bad Wimpfen, Germany.
The expansion of the municipal railway around Heilbronn required the construction and installation of a new railway bridge in Bad Wimpfen, but there was very little space on the site for the 355-tonne steel bridge to be hoisted into place by the large crawler crane.
After proposals for using two cranes to position the bridge were rejected, Riga-Mainz came up with an alternative solution. The Liebherr crawler was set up on two large reinforced concrete ramps, with a dozen piles driven into the site down to a depth of 13 m for this purpose. This way the ramp could withstand the crawler pressure, said Liebherr.
Before the bridge could be lifted, the 355-tonne steel truss construction had to be transported from the assembly site to the construction site using two 10-axle SPMTs.
In order to thread the two supports for securing the handling equipment through the trusses, Riga-Mainz fitted an extension on one side of each of them. This enabled a support crane on the other side of the bridge to handle them and draw the main support into the structure, explained Liebherr.
It was this idea from Riga-Mainz director Uwe Langer that won the company the lifting job, said Liebherr. "Riga-Mainz was the only supplier to offer a solution using just one crane," said Kathrin Gottschang from the project management team at DB ProjektBau. "The concept suggested by Uwe Langer was also the only one that included threading the cross beam through the bridge trusses."
With the cross beam and attachment equipment the LR 1600/2 crane, which was fitted with 565 tonnes of ballast, lifted a total of 402 tonnes. Slowly the crawlers were reversed for about 10 m until the bridge was positioned in place.
Two additional Liebherr cranes - an LTM 1200-5.1 and an LTF 1045-4.1 - were used for set-up and support work.
