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The crew set the lift for 4 a.m. Not because anybody loves a dark start — because steel grows when the sun hits it.
In July 2021, the Ahr Valley floods tore through Bad Neuenahr-Ahrweiler and took the Landgrafenbrücke with them. Five years later, Richter Kran- und Schwerlast GmbH rolled in with two Liebherr LTM 1750-9.1s to set the deck on its replacement.
This is the kind of job that does not show up in a highlight reel. There is no ribbon cutting for a bridge that used to be there. But for the people on both sides of that river, it is the difference between a ten-minute drive and an hour.
Here is the detail that separates a planned lift from a hopeful one. Steel expands with heat. A 105-tonne segment that drops clean into its abutments at dawn can grow just enough by mid-morning that it will not seat at all. So the lift plan put the pick in the coldest part of the day.
Anybody who has ever tried to walk a beam into a tight pocket on a hot afternoon already knows that feeling — the one where the tape says it fits and the steel says otherwise. Richter did not leave that to chance.
Both machines picked together, splitting a 105-tonne bridge segment out to a 38-metre radius. A triangular spreader kept the load balanced between the two units so neither crane took a surprise share of the weight.
The site was a confined riverside pocket, which meant the first crane had to help build the second one before either could do the real job. Standard practice on big iron, but it stacks the day: every hour of assembly is an hour the schedule is not moving deck steel.
Once they were picking, the whole thing came down to two operators staying glued to each other. As one of them put it: "We had to work with great concentration and precision to keep the load on the triangular crossbeam and on both cranes constant."
That is the honest description of a tandem lift. Not heroics — just two people refusing to drift for as long as it takes.
After the main assembly landed, one crane came apart and the other relocated to finish the remaining structural work. The photo op is the pick. The job is the teardown, the move, and the setup that nobody photographs.
A 4 a.m. start to beat thermal growth is the kind of decision that only comes from people who have been burned before. That is the whole trade in one detail: the lift looks effortless because somebody thought three steps ahead in a planning meeting weeks earlier.
Craneaholics makes gear for the crews who work like that — the ones who show up in the dark, get it right the first time, and go home before most people have had coffee. Check out the crane swag if you want something that respects the work.
