Potain wins contract for Chinese bridge

Potain has won a contract to build the biggest tower cranes in its history for the construction of a cable-stay bridge in China.

The two MD 3600 cranes, scheduled for delivery in July 2004, will stand 190m high and will lift 160t at 18m. They will be used on the construction of the third Nanjing Bridge over the Yangtze River at Nanjing, capital of east China's Jiangsu Province. The official signing ceremony was held in Nanjing on 24 November.

The new cable-stay bridge will be part of the national highway linking Shanghai to Chengdu, capital of Sichuan Province in the southwest.

The first bridge over the Yangtze in Nanjing, the Nanjing Yangtze Highway-Railway Bridge, opened in 1960 and was then the world's longest road/rail bridge. The second bridge, 11km downstream, is a double-tower cable-stay bridge and was opened to traffic in 2001.

Potain's previous biggest crane was the MD 2200, which lifts 64t out to nearly 35m, and is in the 2,200tm class. Potain did once design a gigantic 20,000tm crane which would have lifted 360t to 60m and 180t to 100m jib end, a proposal pitched for another bridge project but not accepted as so the crane was never built.

The world's biggest crane remains the Krøll K-10000, rated at 10,000tm. Krøll has also built 5,000tm class K-5000 tower cranes and remains the world leader when it comes to giants.

In the past two years, the Daewoo shipbuilding yard at Okpo, South Korea has taken delivery of two Krøll K-5000s as well as a 4,000tm K-4000 and a 3,000tm K-3000.