She’s getting ready to go on a trip.
This is the transformer that failed July 29. All the big external chunks have been stripped off. a few thousand gallons of oil has been pumped out. She’s been washed. She’s ready for her trip back to the factory.
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That’s a FORTY-wheel trailer she’s sitting on. They’re going to truck her on out of her. I’m surprised. There’s a rail spur a couple of hundred yards behind the substation and I thought they’re drop her on a railcar.
Fortunately for us, the other transformer is fully capable of handling our entire plant load (and then some) without working up a sweat, but our production folks are nervous, so we’re trying to get the utility company to bring in a spare.
40 wheels? Somehow rail seems so much…wiser. But what do I know?
Same as happened many years ago on one of my Fathers jobs–lightin struck and big transformer burned –took Big Truck to haul in and out !
What’s the height and width of that? There might be bridges over the railroad that it wouldn’t clear.
Some years ago the Big Rock nuclear plant in Charlevoix, Michigan shut down and the inner pressure vessel – one big hunk of steel and concrete – was shipped off to somewhere in North Carolina. (I think a better idea would have been to encase it in concrete right where it was and build a new nuke right next to it, but the enviroweenies would rather have coal plants…) It was loaded on a low-boy that might have had even more wheels than that one, and crept 30 miles on county roads, across one railroad line, to another railroad in Gaylord. That’s passing a line that carries trains every day to reach one that hardly gets used once a week anymore. I have to think that the first line must have had some kind of obstruction that the thing wouldn’t fit through.
But the insane thing is that the Big Rock plant is right on Lake Michigan, and thanks to the St. Lawrence Seaway, freighters regularly pass by on their way to and from the Atlantic Ocean. The locks won’t take supertankers, etc., but even a small ocean-going ship is huge compared to a train. Maybe the water is too shallow to bring a ship up to the shore, but they could have hoisted it onto a raft and towed it out to a crane-equipped ship. That would have been a lot less fuss, expense, and hazard than the route they picked.
mark-
Yeah, for that matter, the substation is equally close to a deep-water (40 feet) port with connections to the Intracoastal Waterway, the Gulf of Mexico, and hence the world. We’ve gotten some big stuff in by water for our plant expansion. I don’t know exactly what they have at the other end, though.
MC
There’s a company that builds these in Goldsboro, NC. It’s called Waukesha; wonder if that’s one of theirs. It is a large piece of equipment.
Tom-
Yep! It’s theirs.
MC
I wish I could find the photo of the generator being moved across Iraq when the truck fell over. It looked bigger than this one, but that might just be my faulty memory. Made it all the way from “wherever they make generators”!
The main thing is probably just availability and pricing.
Cajun and I live in “oil country” (though in different parts of it). Forty-wheel trailers aren’t exactly common, but they and the rigs that pull them are readily available because the stuff used on oil rigs tends to be big. A lot of the gigantic pocketapocketa Diesel engines Cajun’s replacing go to oil rigs, for instance, and many of those are as big and heavy as that transformer (or more so). No rail lines to a drilling site ‘way out in the country!
Result: Even I know where to stand to whistle up a “heavy haul” truck. I wouldn’t have any idea how to call up rail service to the same purpose, and even less how to find a barge and towboat.
The other thing — back in the Sixties, when the Interstate system was being built, the rail companies looked at the future and decided that it belonged to “unit trains” and multicar shipments, then set up their whole system to do it that way. If all you’ve got is one carload to one destination, once, they’re gonna quote you a price that’d make it more economical to move the thing with coolies and rollers, and that goes double if it has to have a non-standard car, because it’s completely outside their standard operating methods.
Water shippers do much the same thing. The marginal cost for operating a towboat pushing ten barges isn’t much above what it costs to push one, and they’re gonna charge accordingly for the one-barge load. On top of that, the crane you need to lift something like a multiton transformer across a (generally marshy) canal shoreline is much bigger, and therefore more expensive, than the one to move it twenty feet or so to a trailer set alongside it.
Regards,
Ric
We see these kinds of things going up the haul road to Prudhoe Bay pretty regulary in winter. They’re massive. I live in Fairbanks and anything going north has to come thru here. Nothing really describes the pucker factor of meeting a rig this size coming at you out of the ice fog on an ice covered 2 lane road……
I like redundancy in my plant.
It’s always nice to have 2 of everything.
Doesn’t always happen but it is nice.
Is that the same Waukesha that makes big ass generators up in Wisconsin?