If you have not booked your hotel room in Munich for 2 to 8 April by now, prepare to sleep on a park bench or travel in each day from outlying areas if you are planning on going to Bauma. That’s the bad news.
The good news is that the transport chaos of last time around is unlikely to be repeated now that the new metro rail link is in place, with two separate stations at the massive Messe München showground. The last Bauma, in 1998, was the first at the new out-of-town showground and unfortunately it came about a year too soon for the contractors struggling to put transport links in place.
The growth of Bauma, aided by the relocation of the event in 1998, has been phenomenal. In 1986 there were about 170,000 visitors and 1,000 exhibitors. In 1998 about 380,000 visitors attended, including 110,000 from 130 countries outside Germany, and there were 1,993 exhibitors. This year, the 26th Bauma, the number of visitors is likely to top 400,000. Could it even reach half a million…? Exhibitor numbers were already above 2,000 by the end of last year, with late bookings still being taken.
Such is the demand to attend and exhibit at Bauma, two new exhibition halls have been opened, bringing the total to 15, and indoor floor space to 160,000m2. That is in addition to the outdoor area of 285,000m2 where most of the cranes can be found. Roughly speaking, if a soccer pitch is 100m long by 70m wide, that makes Bauma something like 23 soccer pitches inside and another 40 outside – THAT’S SIXTY-THREE SOCCER PITCHES!! Be sure to wear comfortable shoes! While full details of what you can see at Bauma 2001 will be in next month’s issue of Cranes Today, some of the German mobile crane manufacturers have already given an indication of what we can expect to see on their stands. Liebherr will launch its new 50t all-terrain, the LTM 1050/2, while Dematic will launch its new 60t all-terrain, the AC 60. Both of these companies also have new crawlers to shout about: Liebherr’s 600t LR 1600/1 and Dematic’s 1,000t CC 8800. Grove will show its latest GMK model, the 75t-rated, four-axle GMK 4075, as well as its new top of the range 300 tonner, the GMK 6300 with Megalift (Grove’s version of Superlift). As well as these German-built models Grove will also give a first European showing for the US-built RT 760E, a 55t rough terrain from the new E series. We may also get first sight of a 200t capacity all-terrain from Tadano Faun, the biggest AT to come out of the Lauf factory to date.
As ever, the Cranes Today team will also be out in force and we hope to meet as many readers as possible. The Cranes Today bus (you know the one – bright red, double decker, old-fashioned, open-topped London omnibus) will be parked in the outside area at stand location 705A/1, close to Sennebogen’s stand. So if the leg work of traipsing round all the amazing cranes on show gets too much for you, stop by for a beer and put your feet up for a while.
