November 13 - GAC has coordinated the delivery of a 1,000-tonne metal press from Kaiserslautern in Germany to Volvo Car Corporation's facility in Olofstr

The press was deconstructed into three large pieces that were trucked to the Rhine river port of Ludwigshafen. The cargoes were then loaded onto a barge for a three-day river trip to Rotterdam. There, the parts were reunited with other smaller segments of the press that had travelled overland to the port.

In Rotterdam, the barge tied-up alongside coastal feeder vessel Theseus and the pieces were loaded onboard. While all this was happening, a separate convoy was trucking 20 containers of press parts up through Germany to the port of Hamburg for loading on to another feeder vessel. 

The size and weight of the press pieces presented a number of planning and placement challenges for GAC's project logistics team. Stabilising and lashing heavy cargo is both an art and a science, whether it is going into a hold or on to a heavy-lift trailer, said group project logistics director, Per Thörnblom.

"The bigger pieces needed a lot of attention. We used lots of hardwood blocks to support the loads and then had to work out the right bracing and lashing to hold them all together for the journeys by road, barge and ship," he explained.

"There was a huge amount of planning needed to connect all the dots in this project. Our timings were on target, which means we did our planning well and we didn't have any unexpected delays along the routes we chose for the shipments."

It took three weeks to get all the pieces from Kaiserslautern firstly to the Swedish port of Karlshamn. From there the units were moved by truck to the final project site at Olofström. The press is currently in storage, waiting to be reassembled.

 

 

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