Anyone travelling between New Jersey and New York by train may find themselves in a railcar pulled by an engine from Kassel. The 25 “ALP-45DP DualPower” trains built by Alstom have all come a long way. The operation was a mammoth undertaking for Gruber Logistics. This is because the locomotives could not simply be transported to the Port of Hamburg via the German railway network. At 32 tonnes, their axle load was far too heavy – clearly exceeding the 22.5-tonne limit permissible here. What’s more, the locomotives did not fit on the German tracks. The wheel profile and technical parameters in the US are different.

Consequently, the only possibility for transport was by road. “We began planning the logistics a year before the first transport. It tends to be a rather protracted process until all the approvals and authorisations have been issued for the planned route. This also often delays the start of transport,” explains Holger Dechant, managing director for oversized and heavy transports at Gruber Logistics. After all, train combinations of 60 metres in length, around four metres in width and 4.55 metres in height had to be brought to the Port of Hamburg by road.

The first engine could embark on its journey to America in early 2021. During this process, a roundabout near Paderborn had to be modified and a central lane asphalted. “In fact, the ailing infrastructure in Germany meant that only one route was possible – and even then, a lot of work was required to overcome obstacles,” emphasises Dechant.

In order to transport the trains, a special low-loader trailer also had to be designed and built. The trailer can be lowered down to two centimetres above the road surface, enabling passage through the low bridges found along the route. The 90-tonne locomotive bodies each needed four nights to traverse the first stage from Kassel to Hamburg – 360 kilometres in total. For inclines and downhill stretches, a second tractor unit was used that could push and brake the trailer from behind.

In charge of organising the transport and unloading at the US port was the logistics specialist Züst & Bachmeier, a wholly owned subsidiary of Gruber Logistics. StB Verkehrstechnik was responsible for implementing all necessary measures for preparing the route and accompanying the transport with four vehicles in total. The company took care of the road transports exclusively by itself.

Altogether, it took almost three years until all 25 locomotives could be loaded onto ships. “Although we often have to deal with unusual cargo, this was an extraordinary project even for us. Due to the long duration of the project, we had to keep reviewing and updating our plans. The collaboration of our different teams across the companies involved ultimately allowed us to complete this project smoothly. If you take all 25 transports together, we actually circled the earth four times with the engines,” notes Dechant.

The engines had to take another diversion on the final kilometres through the Hanseatic city of Hamburg. This was because the Ellerholzbrücke bridge, which leads directly to the Unikai departure terminal, was unable to bear the heavy convoy due to its overall weight of 230 tonnes. The locomotives were thus lifted off the truck at Burchhardkai using a floating crane and carried six kilometres along the Elbe to the departure terminal. Once the locomotives arrived here, they were mounted onto their bogies and then loaded onto a ro-ro ship, which took them the 6,000 kilometres to New Jersey