Trucking around even Uhaul’s smallest trailer is the most demanding driving experience some Americans will ever face. A 16-foot utility trailer is a step up from that, and a semi trailer is an almost unimaginable order of magnitude larger. But trailers still get far, far bigger and heavier than that. Take this one for instance: it just hauled a 335-ton transformer with dozens of axles on a roughly 80-mile route across Wyoming.
Actually, it did that seven times between May and September 12. The big job was completed by Omega Morgan, an industrial services company with business in everything from warehousing to heavy machine repair and crane operation. Its most visible operations concern the transport of ultra-heavy equipment, like in this case. Weighing in at 670,000 pounds apiece, they’re the kind of cargo you can’t move with just any trailer—they require something like the behemoth you see here.
Looking more like a bridge span on wheels than a trailer, this apparatus is a slow-mover that required three trucks to pull it at certain points of the job. The first step of that job was unloading the transformers off a monorail car using a jack-and-slide; that’s an arrangement of jacks and tracks that raise, lower, and scooch heavy loads like this from below. With the transformer on the ground, the trailer literally splits in half down its middle for the load to be slid in. The trailer segments are then rejoined around the transformer which is lifted into place, suspended on a cradle beneath the bridge-like structure. Considering it connects the two halves of the trailer like a truss, the bridge analogy is more than a little accurate.
The assembly repeatedly made the almost 80-mile journey across Wyoming as what’s surely the biggest thing any onlooker will ever see on the road. It reduces road wear by splitting its weight—almost 19 times the 80,000-pound legal maximum weight of a regular tractor-trailer combo—across 28 axles. The entire thing takes up both highway lanes and requires a special arrangement of helper trucks when it encounters grades of eight percent or steeper (or just a gravel lot). With those additional trucks hooked up, the gross weight exceeds 1.5 million pounds.
Once near its destination in Medicine Bow, the transformers were switched onto a hydraulic platform trailer to make the final quarter-mile of its journey. Omega Morgan didn’t tell us how long each journey took, but at the pace shown in an Instagram video from the company, it’s easy to imagine it taking days each way.
Sometimes there’s only one way to do things right—not that you have many alternatives when that thing is relocating a gargantuan hunk of the electrical grid.
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