Felbermayr Transports Mammoth Tunnel Boring Machines

Heavy transport equipment specialist Felbermayr has transported two gargantuan tunnel boring machines for the construction of Europe’s 55-kilometre-long Brenner Base Tunnel, the world’s longest underground rail corridor.

The machine components weighing up to 270-tonnes a piece were carried along a six-kilometre stretch from a temporary construction site south and above Innsbruck through very steep and narrow tunnels to the assembly caverns.

Felbermayr described the stretch as “tough-going”, with a gradient of up to twelve percent along half the route and wet mountain tracks that made traction difficult.

“We used the self-propelled SPMT units from Scheuerle with six, ten or twelve axles for these transports; twelve were used for the largest piece weights of 270 tonnes each for the two drives with a diameter of 7.8 metres,” said project manager Markus Meusburger.

“With a total weight of almost 300 tonnes and the steep gradient, we reached the mathematical limit of the brakes, so in order to safely carry out these transports nonetheless, we used a four-axle heavy-duty tractor as an additional braking vehicle. It took us roughly three hours to cover the first three kilometres with the steep gradient, and five hours to complete the entire route.”

Transporting some 30 shipments per tunnel boring machine entailed passing narrow branches, whereby “manoeuvring with centimetre precision was necessary in these areas, and that was probably the greatest challenge,” said Meusburger.

Some components of the tunnel boring machines were less heavy but bulky.

“Parts of the so-called trailer are 15 metres long, four metres wide and four metres high. Because it was very narrow towards the tunnel ceiling, one employee spent five hours sitting on the load in order to precisely instruct his colleague, who was driving the self-propelled unit,” the manager said.

Once inside the assembly cavern, the individual parts were brought into position by Felbermayr’s Engineered Solutions division using a 1,000-tonne lifting frame. The individual parts – which included a 250-tonne drill head with a diameter of 10.7 metres – were then gradually assembled into a large complete unit in the assembly cavern.

Once built, each of the tunnel boring machines weighed an “almost unimaginable” 2,000 tonnes complete with the trailer, Felbermayr said.

Felbermayr had also been awarded the delivery contract for the project.

“From the manufacturer Herrenknecht in Schwanau in Baden-Württemberg, 97 road transports were required for a tunnel boring machine alone, and a further 30 for the trailer produced in Slovakia,” Meusburger said.

“As such, that was a massive undertaking.”

Felbermayr is based in Austria and boasts 77 sites in 18 European countries. The company specialises in heavy transport, mobile crane and working platform rental, heavy-lift handling as well as civil engineering and building construction activities.

Felbermayr recently took over Bulgarian crane rental firm, Maritza, a move designed to strengthen Felbermayr’s position in southeast Europe and allow it to start renting out working platforms in Bulgaria.

Felbermayr’s crane and platform rental business in Europe already comprises 600 mobile and crawler cranes as well as 4,000 working platforms and forklifts.

The firm has been active in crane rentals in Bulgaria since 2007.


Felbermayr is an exhibitor at Breakbulk Europe. Click here for event updates.