Pedestrian walkways have now been installed at Logan International Airport in Boston, USA with the aid of Marino Crane Service and a Demag CC 2800 crawler crane. M De Matteo Construction was the general contractor for the airport improvement works, with Saugus Construction as subcontractor. Saugus hired Marino to unload the 15 steel sections of the walkway from a barge and then to lift them into place. A total of 12,000 tons was lifted during the course of the project and the heaviest trusses weighed about 200 tons.
The Demag worked with 60m of main boom, a 30m back mast and carried 358 tons of trailing counterweight on the Superlift carrier and a further 205 tons on the main body of the crane.
After the barge was unloaded, the crane had to be moved to the erection location. Because the airport was operational and the only access to the erection areas was via the aircraft taxiways, a plan was devised to move the crane fully-erected across the airport – Marino’s very own ‘Logan’s run’. To do this, the Superlift carrier and 30 tons of car body counterweight was removed. The crane was then walked up onto to a double set of crane mats and a trailer was slid underneath. Twelve axle lines of doublewide Goldhofer modular hydraulic trailer moved the crane about 1,500m across the airport pavement from the lay down area to the first erection setup. The crane was later moved in the same way another 1,500m to a second erection location before finally returning to the lay down area to be dismantled. The trusses were also moved from the lay down area to the erection sites on Goldhofer trailers. All the trusses were set between a 12a.m. and 5a.m. window.
