This is a photographic essay depicting the transfer of extremely heavy equipment, consisting of 3 large pieces of coke processing equipment destined for the steel industry, from an large, ocean-going cargo ship to a couple of river barges moored along side, at the Port of Mobile, Alabama. The out-of-gage cargo on the Happy Diamond, consisted of the Coke Transfer Machine (215 tons), the "Coal Charging Car" (235 tons), and "The Pusher" weighing in at over 400 tons! The large and complex steel making equipment had been been designed and built by the German engineering firm, Thyssen/Krupp Uhde GmbH, which had produced and shipped it from the German Baltic Seaport of Luebeck to the Port of Mobile, AL. At the Port of Mobile: the equipment was then off-loaded onto 2 river-barges that would then be responsible for transporting it by inland waterway to the end customer: U.S. Steel Corp. whose plant is located in Clairton, PA outside of Pittsburgh. This inland water leg of the journey was to be made up of a river barge voyage up the Mobile River and connecting with the mighty Ohio River which would then take it to it's destination in the great Monongahela steel-making valley outside Pittsburgh. The U.S. Steel Plant at Clairton, incidentally, has the distinction of being the largest producer of coke in the U.S. - a key ingredient in the manufacture of steel. The entire move was engineered and orchestrated by Pan Projects, a international transport engineering firm and a part of the global Panalpina Group, and required a high degree of planning and coordination between several sub-firms in order to accomplish such a monumental task. Those assisting and providing for in this feat of transport engineering were Panprojects of Houston, TX; Thyssen/Krupp Uhde GmbH of Dusseldorf,Germany; the ship and crew of the Happy Diamond of BigLift Shipping B.V., Amsterdam; Eagle Maritime Consultants of Houston, Empire Stevedoring of Mobile, AL; and the Kirby Corp. - inland-waterway, barge transporters. What joy it was to be a part of and to photograph this "symphony of transport engineering" - orchestrated, accomplished, and engineered by a cadre of many professionals - from dock-workers to ship-hands to transport engineers!
