Rebuilding resilient transport corridors, one step at a time

Standing on Highway 1, you know, on a beautiful sunny day, I'm watching a 225,000 pound tub girder that's 66 meters long, roll up Highway 1, sitting on trailers that are controlled by a remote. And that's just not something you see every day. The Tank Hill Project is a part of the BCHRP, which is the reinstatement program for the natural disasters out of the November 2021 floods. We are reinstating a bridge, as you can see here, and trying to build an environmentally resilient transportation solution through this corridor. Our scope on this portion of the bridge was just tandem picking with our 1650 and LR1600. That involved Scott with our SPMTs bringing the entire girder, it's about 220,000 pounds, up the roadway where we just tandem picked it off the road. PMTs are used for moving big things in tight areas. We've got a nine percent grade going up the road, which our trailers are more than capable of doing. So we got one girder two days ago, and then we got both remaining girders yesterday. One of the largest challenges was coordination, specifically between ministry, the public, and the railway. A lot of this corridor has to stay live for service. I mean, we're operating over Highway 1 here. There's a lot of trains that come through every single day, so it's coordination between all those parties, all the careful planning and execution that goes into making this go off without a hit. A lot of it was just planning ahead of time, due to how narrow this section is, and then dealing with the live traffic alongside the train coming through. So you're always working with time constraints, and then obviously nothing's flat here. So just careful planning on positioning ahead of time, how you want to get into position to do the lifts, and then also being able to get out once those lifts are completed. Everything we do you can't see, so everything's blind. You've really got to trust everyone that you're working with. Guys on the piers and everything, they're your eyes, so you really got to listen to them and follow them. I would have to say everything went right. It's one of those operations that you have hundreds and hundreds of hours from different groups working together. Pre-planned meetings, pre-lift meetings, working with all the groups really made it work smooth. It's one of those things that you don't see the hard work that goes into it, so when the operation goes very smoothly, it makes it seem like it's easy. We move the biggest things in the world. A multi-disciplinary job with the crawler crane, the all-terrain crane, and the SB&Ts, I think it really sheds light on what our branch is able to take on and plan and execute.