Crawler Crane, Huddersfield Station

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Today I decided to pop into Huddersfield to see the huge crawler crane that is being used to remove the old railway bridge over John William Street and install the new one. The weather was not ideal as the photos show, but I’ll be back to get more photos next week, when hopefully, the weather will be better.

In order to remove the bridge, it had to be cut into sections that could be carried away by road on a heavy transporter. Each section had to be lifted by the crane; the crane would then crawl over to the heavy transporter and load the section onto it.

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

Apparently they have one for sale.

It arrived from Norway on sixty trucks (and I guess, 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 anyway you need to be a large distance away from it to get it all in the frame.

Apparently, the crawler tracks are two-meters wide.

The crane towers above the two humans.

This post is first of a series of posts about the Huddersfield Station upgrade. The next one is here.

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