15.10.2001

Mammoet’s move

A uniquely international crane hire service is developing between Tyneside and IJmuiden in The Netherlands. At the heart of the service is the DFDS ferry link between Newcastle and Rotterdam which allows international crane specialist Mammoet to move mobile cranes between jobs in the UK and the Netherlands overnight. This means that a crane can be working on a Dutch construction site one day and, thanks to the roll on roll off ferry service, on a British one the next.

A recent example of the realities of the service was when two of Mammoet’s five-axle, 100 tonne capacity Grove GMK5100 cranes were brought from the Netherlands to the UK to work on a long-term contract hire at the Swan-Hunter shipyard. The cranes are working two shifts a day, 24 hours a day, on the fitting out of the new Japanese-built Global Producer III, a floating production, storage and offloading (FPSO) vessel.

Another example is the crane featured on this month’s cover. This was delivered, brand new, from the Mammoet fleet in The Netherlands. It caught the ferry at 6.00pm in the evening, rolled off the next day at 9.00am and, (after posing for a few photographs), was hard at work on its first project at 10.00am.

* To read the full story, complete with photos, download the article from this month's issue of "Cranes & Access".