World's heaviest building transport

Chinese heavy lift company Sinotrans Heavy-Lift was commissioned to reposition a 7,500-tonne hotel by 500 metres to comply with environmental regulations in the city of Sanya, Hainan province, China. The company says it is the world's heaviest building transport ever carried out.

To move the hotel Sinotrans distributed the load on 254 axle lines of Scheuerle SPMT powered by 15 power pack units.

A key challenge was the uneven distribution of the load due to the asymmetrical architecture of the 90 metre long, 35 metre wide and 20 metre high building. Nevertheless, Sinotrans had to level and position the structure with the utmost precision. Furthermore, the experts from Sinotrans had to turn the building clockwise by 63 degrees and subsequently counter-clockwise by 63 degrees during transportation in or-der to reach the new location.

To master the task, Sinotrans coupled the self-propelled SPMT platform transporters at different angles to each other to form a fan-shaped combination. According to Sinotrans, the high load capacity and the good synchronisation of the individual modules very much favoured the use of SPMT axle lines as, with-out them, the heavy goods logistics specialist would not have achieved the required high level of precision. It took Sinotrans eight hours to lift the building and transport it precisely and safely over the 500-metre-long route with the help of the SPMT axle lines and set it up again at its destination.

Sinotrans is a long-standing customer of TII Scheuerle and its fleet includes 60 Scheuerle SPMT axle lines. Additional modules for this job came from the joint venture Sinotrans Sarens Logistics and other cooperation partners.