A complete hospital wing was transported in individual parts by the Austrian family-owned company Felbermayr in cooperation with Haeger & Schmidt Logistics. The building, which is divided into 104 room modules, was transported from Cadolzburg in Bavaria to the construction site in Belgium. The project was successfully completed at the beginning of February.
Cadolto is a specialist in the planning and realisation of complex, technically demanding buildings in modular construction. In June 2020, the market leader for medical buildings received the order to realise the modular ward at the “Centre Hospitalier de Wallonie picarde” in the shortest possible time. The five-storey modular building with a gross floor area of 5,590 m² holds a capacity of 121 beds on four floors. The building’s technical center is located on the fifth floor.
The transport and lifting technology specialist Felbermayr, which specialises in oversized cargos, was involved from the very beginning – for the project manager Matthias Pichl, this meant developing a reliable transport solution for the project so that the modules were ready on time at the construction site.
Due to the sometimes large dimensions, he chose inland waterway transport for the main run. He chartered a total of eleven barges from HSL’s Projects Division for this purpose. “We minimised the truck share to the pre-carriage and onward carriage. This approach lent itself to the many special transports that otherwise required approval, and was also the best solution from an ecological point of view. “The largest module for the project was about 20 m long, 5 m wide and 4 m high. The maximum weight of a module was about 32 tons,” Pichl says.
The barges were on the move for about a week on the transport section between the port of Fürth (only 12 km away from the production site in Cadolzburg) and the destination in Tournai, Belgium. A challenge for the transshipment was that four ships had to be handled in Fürth within a very short time in the first project section and seven in the second. A mobile crane was used for this.
In the inland port of Vaulx, a suburb of Tournai, the modules were unloaded and stored by the Belgian subcontractor Dufour. Haeger & Schmidt Logistics Belgium took care of the site logistics coordination and supervision. “For more than a month, our partner Dufour provided the modules needed in each case just in time at the construction site,” reports Muriel Marquet, Managing Director of Haeger & Schmidt Logistics Belgium. The entire logistics project time from the point of departure in Cadolzburg to the destination in Tournai took only three months.
More information about Cadolto at www.cadolto.com.
(Photo right: Construction of the modular ward at Centre Hospitalier de Wallonie picarde with a capacity of 121 beds. Photo: DUFOUR)