Big Move: How Six Gigantic Beer Vats Traveled to Toronto

No, these aren't segments of a new NASA rocket. But pretty soon, there's going to be a lot more Molson beer in the world.

Toronto's BlogTO explains why:

For the last few days, six giant beer vats have slowly plodded their wayt through the last 108 kilometres of a journey that started in Burgstadt, Germany and that will end sometime tonight or early tomorrow morning at the Molson Coors Brewery on Carlingview Drive [in Toronto, Canada]. The vats were originally supposed to arrive early today, but cold weather and difficulties with hydro wires that needed to be taken down to accommodate the over-sized vehicles have led to a slight delay.

Here are a few of the somewhat staggering statistics related to the journey:

• $24 million (cost for the tanks and the move)
• 40+ support vehicle convoy (police cars, utility vehicles)
• 35 police officers (to guide the trucks and control traffic)
• 250 traffic lights taken down and put back up
• 1600+ Hydro wires lifted or taken down to accommodate the vats)
• More than five and a half million bottles of beer can fit in the tanks

IMAGES: Molson's new beer tanks en route to Toronto. From top, photos by JDB Photos, Dieseltheque, BigBrotherBear, and Louis Tam.

Comments

[Charles]

What?? From the linked story's pics, It looks like these tanks came off a freight ship, fully assembled. I wonder how the Germans got them on the boat, they were built far inland, away from shipping. It would probably be cheaper to assemble them right on the docks. For that matter, it would probably have been cheaper to assemble them right at the Molson plant.

Anyway, it seems to me like these tanks would have been a lot cheaper to move by heavy-lift helicopters. How much did each tank weigh?

[dr.hypercube]

I'm guessing that at least a couple of the trailers were Goldhofers which would imply weights that even an Mi-12 would choke on.