A project almost two years in the making came together yesterday for Logistics Plus and our customer Rogers Brothers Corporation. Rogers Brothers, manufacturer of ROGERS® low-bed heavy-hauler semi-trailers, designed and constructed the largest trailer they have manufactured since WWII for their customer, Southern Peru Copper Mine Corp. The monster-sized trailer is designed to haul large mining equipment off-road and is two-to-three times larger than a standard highway trailer. Fully assembled, it weighs 94 tons, is over 100 feet long, 20 feet wide, and is capable of hauling 440,000 pounds. Each one of its 24 tires is made of solid rubber (i.e., no air) and weighs close to 1,000 pounds. This one trailer is so big, that Logistics Plus needed to coordinate six over-dimensional trailer loads to legally move it on U.S. highways.
Rogers Brothers trusted Logistics Plus to coordinate the movement of the trailer from its manufacturing facility in Albion, PA to a warehouse at the Port of Houston in Texas, where the end customer will ship the trailer via ocean breakbulk to Peru. Many Logistics Plus team members – including Andy Seidler, Matt Bosko, Abi Lopez, Gretchen Seth, Craig Warnshuis, Gretchen Blough, Jeremy Chaffee, and others – were involved off and on over the past two years to assist the Rogers Brothers staff in costing, planning, quoting, surveying, and finally coordinating and loading the trucks.
Logistics Plus team members, Gretchen Blough and Jeremy Chaffee were onsite yesterday at Rogers Brothers to help coordinate the final details, including trucks, drivers, riggers, and paperwork. As often is the case, some ‘behind the scenes’ hiccups and weather issues made things interesting. In the end, however, the combined team battled through a snowstorm, ice, and cold to load all six truckloads in just over eight hours. The customer is very pleased, and everything is proceeding on schedule to deliver to Houston.
If you have big, unique, or challenging project cargo as described here, then contact us and let our Logistics Plus specialists go to work for you too.
The Logistics Plus Belgium office was recently approached by Wärtsilä Oil & Gas Systems AS to help them ship an LNG pump on a skid from Qidong, China to the Navantia shipyard in El Ferrol, northwest Spain. Part of the challenge was that the skid was a whopping 11.8 meters long, 6.4 meters wide and 5.8 meters high, and it weighed close to 42 metric tons. Additionally, the earliest the skid would be available from the Chinese supplier was November 5th, and it absolutely had to deliver to its Spain destination by December 22nd.
To address this logistics dilemma, the Logistics Plus project cargo team, led by Frederik Geirnaert, designed and sourced a routing solution that included the following steps:
Securing space on a November 6th barge from Qidong to Shanghai, Yangshan
Overseeing the loading of the container vessel in Yangshan
Ocean shipping on the fast service to Zeebrugge, Belgium
Ground transport to the Zeebrugge terminal
Loading and shipping on a RORO vessel from Zeebrugge to El Ferrol
Barge shipping from El Ferrol to Navantia shipyard and arrive on December 22nd
This solution not only delivered the skid to Spain on time but also at a cost that was much less expensive than an inducement call to Navantia. To showcase this project cargo solution, Frederick edited and uploaded the following video to the Logistics Plus YouTube Channel. The video is only 46 seconds long to match the spirit of the 46-day move from China to Spain (so you might want to watch it more than once)!
If you have unique, complex, or simply “ugly” project cargo shipping needs, look no further than the experts at Logistics Plus. Project cargo is a core competency for us, and we’ll do what other logistics companies either can’t or won’t do. Send us an email to marketing@logisticsplus.com, give us a call at 866.564.7587, or use our Quick Quote form to get the process started.
Logistics Plus is an expert at handling big cargo and big projects, and managing those projects across the entire supply chain. We have managed some pretty interesting projects “from cradle-to-grave,” including transporting locomotives to Indonesia, shipping wind-turbines across Europe, moving tugboats into the Middle East, and helping set up the largest solar energy farm in the world!
The video below shows some very cool footage of an ongoing project we are involved with transporting 566-ton gas tanks from China to Brazil. If you look closely, you’ll see that we have less than 1 inch on either side of the compressed blocks to insert this heavy load into the foundation while the load is suspended from 2 vessel cranes in tandem, and while the foundation itself is afloat and bobbing about. Also if you look closely, the guy running around in the yellow hardhat managing the project is our very own Frederik Geirnaert, Logistics Plus project manager in China. Frederik also shot all of the footage, including some very cool time-lapse sequences.
If your company has unique or complex supply chain challenges, look no further than Logistics Plus®! We specialize in handling all of the “stuff” the other guys won’t handle, and doing all of the “extra little things” the other guys won’t do. That’s how we put the “plus” in Logistics Plus! Contact us for more information.
From your small pack shipment to LPG tanks, we have the solution for you! Check out this move for Wartsila Vard, captured by Frederik Geirnaert in our Antwerp office: China to Brazil Move
Recently, Manish Khanduja who works in our New Delhi, India office handled this shipment of a windmill nacelle and hub. The nacelle’s weight is 75 metric tons each and the hub weight is 26 metric tons each. These we moved via truck from Himachal Pradesh, India to Jaisalmer, Rajasthan, India, which is a distance of approximately 1200 kilometers.
