Four solid-cast mill stands, each weighing 315 tonnes, took almost 2.5 months to travel from China to a metallurgical plant in Asha, Chelyabinsk region. The route ran across seas, rivers and highways.
Stands for the rolling mill
The stands serve as the load-bearing base of the rolling stand. Each is 13.6 metres long, 4.6 metres wide and 2.1 metres thick. The main transport challenge is not the dimensions but the weight: moving 315 tonnes overland from plant to plant is impossible — most bridges and roads are not designed for such loads.
From the factory in the Chinese industrial area of Chengdu-Deyang, the stands were loaded onto a barge and sent along the river to a seaport. Then, using floating cranes, they were loaded onto a sea vessel. The cargo passed through Southeast Asian waters, the Indian Ocean, the Bab el-Mandeb Strait, the Red Sea, the Suez Canal, the Mediterranean, the Strait of Gibraltar, the Atlantic, the English Channel and the Baltic Sea.
In St. Petersburg, the Russian part of the journey began. Two 400-tonne terminal cranes with a special spreader bar transferred each stand from the sea vessel to a river barge. Then the river convoy traveled along the Neva, Lake Ladoga, the Svir, Lake Onega, the Volga-Baltic Waterway, the Volga, the Kama and the Belaya. This stage had to be completed within the navigation season.
In Ufa, a temporary berth was built to receive the heavy machines. The stands were unloaded in a special manner, rolled off the barge onto a specialized 24-axle truck. The final stretch — about 110 kilometres to Asha — required engineering preparation: bridges and other artificial structures were surveyed, turning radii widened on several sections, gravel mixture added and road slabs laid.
Result: the transport took about 2.5 months, covering a distance comparable to half the Earth’s circumference.