Perkins STC contracted with a major power plant equipment manufacturer to transport one of its new power packages to a job site in South Dakota. The power package, consisting of a turbine skid came in at a hefty 372,000 lbs and its 366,000 lb generator had been barged up the Mississippi River from the manufacturer's Houston, TX facility to a privately owned barge-unloading site in Rosemount, MN.
To accomplish the imposing task of transporting these loads, Perkins employed the use of its 14-lines of Goldhofer THP/DLL hydraulic platform trailer powered by a couple of our uniquely outfitted and powerful Kenworth C500 tractors. A key reason to utilize Perkins' Goldhofer highway equipment was the fact that no torsion would be transferred from the hauling configuration into the turbine skid it carried during transport. Perkins' experienced crew easily eliminated this potential for internal stresses to the cargo through the initial set up of the Goldfofer gear into a three-point hydraulic suspension system prior to loading.
Prior to Perkins' arrival of its fully assembled transport to the bar-unloading site from the its nearby Northfield, MN corporate headquarters & operations center, the cargo had been offloaded from a barge by a local crane & rigging contractor who had placed the power plant components into temporary elevated storage using its 3m wide platform trailer on-site. Upon our arrival, the 60' - 0" long, 15' - 0" wide, and 14' - 11" high turbine skid was lifted atop our 121' - 0" long and 18' - 0" wide dual lane loading modular platform trailer. This huge trailer configuration was equipped with 28 integrated axles yielding a total of 112 tires, the equivalent of 14 individual house-moving dollies used in older beam dolly transporters. Once secured to the trailer, a single Perkins C500 with its powerful 600-hp engine and planetary drive train pulled the loaded configuration from the storage area near the river up a 8° slope to a point near the highway on the terminal's private road for preparation for the high way transport.
In Minnesota, the hauling of super heavy, over-dimensional loads can only be accomplished between the hours of 1:00am to 5:00am. Perkins, with its base operation located just 40 miles south of the Twin Cities of Minneapolis and St. Paul, was prepared to make the best use of the allotted time through careful pre-planning of the project and the depth of transport experience making short work of the project. In order to get our point of egress from that state, Perkins' project manager selected an intermediate point at Mankato, MN to deliver the load during the first Minnesota DOT allotted 4 hours of loaded transport time. After a second night of operations in Minnesota, Perkins' crew reached the South Dakota line and continues its journey to the new power plant addition in Groton, SD. After being offloaded at the job site, the transporter was demobilized back to Rosemount and later successfully transported the dimensionally smaller, slightly lighter generator unit. Both of these hauls were safely completed on schedule and to the satisfaction of the Perkins customer.
