The little town of Papenburg is right up in the north of Germany, just a few kilometres from the Dutch border. This is where, 50 kilometres from the coast and only linked to the North Sea by a river and a wide bay, you will find the massive buildings of the traditional Meyer Werft, which can be seen from miles around in the flat landscape. The shipbuilding business was founded in 1795, launched its first cruise ship 35 years ago and is now one of the global players in this booming segment. And although the eager shipbuilders in Emsland have the largest covered construction dock in the world, the business appears to be bursting at the seams. Because the building, which measures over 500 metres in length and 75 metres in height, is often too low for the ocean-going giants, the high components such as funnel casings and antenna systems are increasingly having to be installed in the open air. Furthermore, the time pressure in the construction docks is so great that the floating sections, which are up to 140 metres long and are later assembled to produce the luxury liners, are often guided out of the docks and completed outdoors.

This is where large mobile cranes come into play. For many years, crane service providers Gertzen and Ulferts, based in Lower Saxony, and their mobile cranes have been providing support to the Papenburg-based shipbuilder with the construction of their “floating towns”. “Nowadays we take our large cranes to the Papenburg shipyard around three times a year”, says Managing Director Wolfgang Gertzen, whose company provides crane and heavy haulage logistics services from its headquarters in Kluse, 20 kilometres away. Ulferts cranes are also frequent visitors to the shipyard site. Generally, several mobile cranes are in action at the same time, working on the final phases of a finished luxury liner, shortly before it is handed over to the customer. For the first time this summer, an LG 1750 lattice boom crane, operated by Nolte-Autokran based in Hanover, made its way through the Papenburg works gates.

A large glass domed roof measuring around 1000 square metres had to be installed over the pool on the sundeck in one of the centre sections of a vessel. This job was certainly not an everyday event and proved to be extremely complicated. To prevent damaging the filigree dome structure, which is made up of 340 separate panes of insulated glass, its weight had to be spread evenly over 20 fastening points. It took hours before the curved, oval glass roof was finally suspended on the lifting tackle and levelled using the special cross beam. Hoisting the domed roof with a gross load of 138 tonnes was almost simple by comparison. The hoisting process took less than half an hour before the installation workers could secure the free-standing glass dome on its supports on the ship section.

This article was published in the UpLoad magazine 02 | 2019.