Crawler Crane, Huddersfield Station

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Today I decided to pop into Huddersfield to see the huge crawler crane that’s being used to remove the old railway bridge over John William Street and install a new one.

The original bridge had to be cut into sections small enough to be carried away by road on a heavy transporter. Each section was lifted by the crane, which then crawled over to the transporter to load the section onto it. The new bridge also came in sections, delivered prior to the work starting.

The landlord of the Sportsman pub told me the bridge sections passed within meters of his bedroom window, scary.

It’s owned by the Dutch company Mammoet (which means mammoth in Dutch). It’s a Terex-Demag CC 6800 crane, capable of lifting 1,250 tons.

Apparently they have one for sale.

It came from Norway on sixty trucks (and a ship or two). They needed a smaller crane to assemble it! When finished at Huddersfield it’s going to Abu Dhabi.

I wonder how much it cost to rent.

It’s a difficult thing to photograph. You can’t get close to it because it’s on a construction site, and you need to be a long distance away from it to get it all in the frame. I only found one possible place. The weather didn’t help.

Apparently, the crawler tracks are two-meters wide.

The crane towers above the two humans.

All journal posts about the station upgrade are tagged with Huddersfield-Station-Upgrade; the next one is here.

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