Mega Transports

When the first ship of the brand-new OOCL-fleet gets underway, more cargo is moved at one time than anywhere else in the world and ever before. The vessels are the largest ever ordered - 400 meters long and about as wide as a football field (58.8 meters). These ships will not only be able to load more cargo than ever, they will also be equipped with a number of high-class energy-saving systems.

Everyone knows it: Housemoving is a lot of work, requires excellent planning and costs time and money. Just imagine how it must be if you are moving an entire village - as a whole. Impossible? The dutch logistic and heavy transport company Mammoet says: Not for us! And that's what they do: the Swedish city of Malmberget has to make room for a mine and therefore move to nearby Koskullskulle.

A giant of the skies - the Antonov AN-124-100M-150. Worldwide the biggest production cargo aircraft of all time. No aircraft can transport more goods than the Russian giant. At the height of the Cold War: an important means of national transport and prestige object for the Soviet Union. Today: it is in use all over the world and is the queen of international air transport.

Meyer Werft in Germany is one of the biggest shipbuilders in the world. But it's problem is as big as the ships it builds: the coast and sea are 50 kilometres away. From Papenburg, the only route to the North Sea leads via the shallow and narrow river Ems which is actually entirely unsuitable for conveying gigantic cruise ships. But still, every Meyer Werft ship has to negotiate this channel.

If a transporter needs to be transported, if 176 wheels aren't enough to carry its weight and if the load weighs twice as much as the transporter... Then it must be the mother of all mega transports! The setting: Canada. The cargo: an ultra-class dump truck. The heroes: tough men with delicate fingers and eagle eyes.

Transporting a ship by a ship - this becomes necessary when the super-rich want their super yacht available at a vacation paradise at the other end of the world, but do not want to sail it there themselves. That's when specialized companies like Sevenstar Yacht Transport come into play who take yachts across the oceans to the still so smallest islands or as a mass delivery to the Côte d'Azur.

The team faces winding country lanes, ramshackle bridges and an unexpected change of plan as its members try to take a 390 tonne generator on a journey of 120km, before their permits expire.

Russia has some of the most extreme weather conditions in the world, especially in winter. Transporting one of the biggest bulldozers in the world, to gold mines in the Kolymar mountain range in eastern Russia is a major mission, through an inhospitable frozen landscape of snow covered mountain passes, temporary bridges and unpaved ice roads.

A wind farm - over 2,000 tons of highly sensitive and valuable cargo - needs to get from Europe to Taiwan in Asia using one of the world's largest heavy lift vessels. A team has only 37 days for loading in two ports and travelling once around half of the globe. To be able to transport the entire cargo, the crew even has to build another level altogether - in the middle of the deck.

The Höegh Trapper is the largest car transporter in the world. It can carry 8,000 vehicles in 71,000 square metres of storage space. One of the construction design factors was the need to negotiate the bottleneck of the Panama Canal.

The worlds largest, but extremely sensitive and valuable, radio telescope array antennas, have to be relocated to new sites in the inhospitable Chilean Atacama Desert. The job is further complicated by the 5,000 metre altitude, and extreme weather.

The brand new oil rig, West Bollsta, worth $500 million, travels from manufacture in South Korea to Europe. Although self powered, the rig still needs a specialised high powered ocean tug, the ALP Striker, to assist with the long trip.