Tie four miles or so of steel drill pipe together in one
long string and you can imagine how strong the derrick and machinery have to be to lift that much weight straight up out of a hole in the ground. Now imagine the kind of truck you might need to move that much machinery around.

Few Canadians bother pondering questions like that. As far as they’re concerned, the petroleum industry is their corner service station, the one that dispenses the liquid gold that comes up those drill pipes and out of holes bored deep into the Alberta prairie. But oil is big business here, and the equipment it requires is completely in proportion, from the B-train tankers supplying the service stations to the flatdecks with their loads of steel pipe and gear of all descriptions going up and down the highway. And then there are the specialty trucks and custom-built rigs used to move drilling rig components from one location to another.

They’re designed with long beds and powerful winches, which are ideal for oilfield work but are too big and heavy for much else. The special well-service trucks with immense pumps, seismic equipment, and such mounted on their backs have but a single purpose in life, as do the trucks that move the rock-hard, oil-soaked sand called bitumen that’s found all over Northern Alberta. That stuff is mined rather than drilled, and must be transported from the pits to the processing plants by the largest end-dump trucks in the world.

But there’s another element to the big, hairy petroleum industry: the hardware that turns the thick black stuff into gold. Because the refineries are seldom located around the corner from the factories where the equipment is made, we need some big-mother trucks to move those immense machines to market.

The heavy-haul rigs designed to transport the huge refinery, drilling, and mining components the length and breadth of the province never go unnoticed, and because of the spectacular size and weight of their cargo, they’re worthy of mention, especially this beauty, owned and operated by McDougal Transport, the heavy-haul division of Edmonton’s Northern Industrial Carriers. (NIC).

Components for these huge, sprawling processors are built all over the world-including Alberta-but they must be transported to the site and erected. The tricky part is that the boilers, towers, high-pressure vessels, and the like have to be manufactured and moved in one piece. Machines weighing 200 tons or more, with dimensions more resembling a townhouse complex than a bungalow, are common. The trucks and trailers built for these hauls are necessarily even bigger than the chunks they pack, and they still have to adhere to somewhat relaxed (but enforced) Alberta highway rules and regulations. On arrival at the site, they still must be tough enough to negotiate field conditions.

McDougal Transport has, amongst a wider selection of more conventional heavy-haul equipment, one of the biggest brutes available to the oil patch. This monster very seldom runs anywhere but north and south between Calgary, Edmonton, and Fort McMurray-the tar sand centre.

Processing plants the size of small towns, such as those run by Syncrude, Suncor, and Shell Oil (among others), are constantly under construction, upgrading or expanding, making almost constant use of these NIC monsters. Because soft road conditions for five months of the year limit or prevent moving the heaviest of loads, fall and winter maximum-permit periods keep the fleet going steadily in the cold winter months.

McDougal’s pride and joy is a two-year-old Aspen double-drop, sitting on a combination of 80 wheels. Eight axles, with eight tires each, and eight sets of dual-wheel “training wheels” or outriggers support the 62-foot-long lower floor. Through hydraulic or remotely steered boosters, the wheel group at the rear can be hydraulically controlled and guided by a simple bar hookup.

With one of four specially designed tractors hooked to it, the overall length is 162 feet. And if 62 feet of floor isn’t long enough, they can drop in another 20-foot section. The rig sits 11 feet wide before attaching the outrigger axles, which whomps it up to 16 feet, 7 inches across. With the tractor hooked to it, and the obligatory counterweight sitting atop the drive axles, it tips the scale at 162,000 pounds-empty.

The four 2003 Western Star tractors were custom-built primarily to pull this monster wagon. With Cummins N14 525-horse engines, 18-speed Eaton Fuller trannies with two-speed auxiliaries, plus planetary drive axles sitting on 12-x-24.5 rubber, there’s not much that’ll stop them. With their 25-ton Tulsa winches and extra do-dads needed for the field work, they each weigh 28,000 pounds alone, full of fuel.

For tight spots, a wireless remote-control device, handled by a following vehicle, can steer it safely around corners or obstacles. The floor height, controlled by a series of very “skookum” rams, can ground the rig then lift it to whatever height might be necessary.
Heavy and very long loads-too long for the possible 82 feet of deck space-crop up on occasion. But in a matter of minutes, the floor and gooseneck sections can be lowered to the ground, and the wheel groups can be removed and rigged with swivel bunks. In addition, the rear group can be placed under the load as far back as necessary. It still retains mechanical or remote steering capability from its self-contained gas engine and hydraulic pumps.
A notable part of this custom design is the beefy swivel hitch mounted on the front of each tractor. With a permitted 266,000-pound payload and 162,000 pounds of unit, it takes three tractors-two tied together, pulling, and one at the rear, pushing, with a total of almost 1,600 horsepower-to move the big loads.

A top speed of 30 mph, loaded or empty, means that it takes days to complete a 500-mile trip from Calgary to Fort McMurray.

Of course, the power units are geared to go on a little more quickly than that, so when they’re pulling one of their “little” 60- or 48-wheelers (and on down the list: there are dozens of everything), they become rather heavy high-milers.

The Alberta government loves this 16-wheel bogie setup as pressure on the highway is distributed over the entire lane, preventing the grooving caused by standard-width tandems with dual wheels. The drivers on these monsters just crawl along at 25 or 30 mph, pilot cars front and back and power and telephone company service trucks in tow. Often, there’s a police escort tagging along as well. Beauty is, they’re all paid by the hour: trucks, drivers, cops, the lot. Their paycheques are some of the best in the business, and nobody seems to mind waiting around for a set of wires to be moved.

It takes a special breed to perform this kind of extreme trucking, and two of McDougal’s heavy-haul managers are experts: Murray Fedunec and Don Dziwenco. These guys know just about all there is to know about this kind of work. What they don’t know either ain’t worth worrying about, or will someday become the stuff of a great nightmare.

The guys agree that there are bigger trucks around, but they can’t operate on pavement. That cuts the herd to a mere handful of highway-capable rigs like their brute. There’s a lot to be said for a truck like this one, but Murray Fedunec says it best in summing up the principle advantage of all the extra hardware.

“We’ve had pieces on there that were 30 feet wide, 20 feet tall, filling the floor from front to rear, and weighing upwards of 150,000 pounds. Our older 48-wheelers would sway back and forth like rafts in rough water,” he says. “With these outriggers at 16 feet, that problem’s solved.”
Even the legal-axle-only ban that prevents most low-bedders from moving doesn’t interfere here. You can still heave on 50 tons and get all those axles legal. That’s called “building to fill a need.” But given the petroleum industry’s fondness for doing things in a large way, I shudder to think how big the equipment will need to be 10 years from now! sThere’s no distance that will keep Don Anderson from hauling something really, really heavy. Last August, the heavy-hauler from Stouffville, Ont., led eight trucks and flatbeds1,500 miles east for an eight-day assignment in P.E.I. The job–tempting enough to overrule the cost of sending that many empty trailers, drivers, and tractors a third of the way across the country–required Don Anderson Haulage to unload what would be North America’s largest wind turbine off a ship at Summerside harbour and take it 100 kilometres to Norway, P.E.I.

That week, dozens of potato farmers looked up Veterans Memorial Highway, and saw what they might have thought was a parade coming their way. But there were no marching bands or balloons on these floats. Coming over the highway’s hilltops instead were four trucks and flatbed dollies carrying the turbine’s tower pieces (ranging from 13 to 73 feet in diameter and 75,000 to 115,000 pounds); three contracted trucks hauling additional parts in containers; and a supporting cast of police, utility, and escort vehicles.

But the real crowd-pleaser was the rig hauling the main 85-tonne nacelle generator at 40 clicks, and again a couple days later on a separate trip, the turbine’s 90-metre diameter blades. Once erected, the tower and nacelle unit (which houses the generator, gear box, transformer, and hub) would stand a combined 40 stories and weigh more than 500,000 pounds.

What kind of monster machine can take on such a job? To pull the 200,000-pound nacelle generator and wind blades, Anderson used a tractor powered by a 430-horsepower Detroit Diesel Series 60 and an Allison six-speed automatic transmission, backed up by a two-speed auxiliary transmission for lots of reduction, and planetary rear-ends rated at 85,000 pounds. “That truck will only go 40 miles an hour–that’s the top speed, so it’s got all the power at the low gears,” says Anderson.

The real action is behind the coupling. Carrying the generator was a custom-made German Scheuerle trailer with eight wheels across eight axles. All 64 wheels can be hydraulically suspended and controlled individually. Total combination length: 187 feet.
Planning for this job began eight months in advance, and it wasn’t a piece of cake from Anderson’s home base 1,500 miles away. There were countless long-distance phone calls and a bunch of trips back and forth before the vessel carrying the turbine even docked, says Anderson. On those initial visits, Anderson, government engineers, and officials from the turbine’s owner, Vestas Canada, mapped out a blueprint for one of the biggest-ever hauls in the region. First, they scouted the pier where the boat would dock, planning out the logistics of Anderson’s trucks and the unloading process of the turbine with a crane. Administration was next–acquiring all the necessary permits while minding all local heavy-haul bylaws such as night-time driving restrictions. Anderson had to give an estimate of what kind of weight he was planning to put on the road. With some crafty weight distribution software, he was able to determine the weight impact right down to the PSI on each axle–both empty and loaded–per truck.

Finally, there was a survey of the route and a “dress rehearsal” of sorts, where Anderson and the other parties checked out intersections, bridges, hazards, and road grades. “Imagine how embarrassing it would be, with all this equipment and all these people, if you get to a point and realize you can’t make a turn,” says Anderson.

In case of unexpected trouble–say a roadblock forces a detour on a narrow two-lane highway–it’s Scheuerle to the rescue. With 64 remote-controlled wheels, this beauty can snake around Pike’s Peak with little trouble.

Perhaps the most challenging part on any heavy-haul is the coordination and communication with up to a dozen different parties. Who comes along for the ride? In Don Anderson’s case, there’s the management for Vestas Canada; RCMP and local police to oversee the operation and direct traffic through several construction zones; bridge engineers to monitor crossings; the cable company and Maritime Electric to raise or temporarily remove wires; pilot car operators who sandwich the convoy; technicians trained in hydraulics in case of a roadside breakdown; and a crew to remove overhead signs in Summerside. “In this case, there was also a company we had to contract with a crane to put down steel plates over these large culverts we were crossing over,” says Anderson.

Anyone else who needs to get paid? “Things here and there,” says Anderson. “Cranes to unload the parts from the boat onto our trucks. … Security at the dock to watch the turbine blades until we could come back for them. There’s a lot of people involved.”

The final bill? Just about $100,000 -not counting indirect costs such as eight months of planning, or wear and tear and fuel for a small fleet of unloaded trucks going to P.E.I and back. “There’s no backhaul when you’re talking about this kind of equipment,” says Anderson.

So you mean there’s not many 40-storey turbines from Summerside to Toronto popping up on the job boards, Don?
“Umm … no.”