Think you’re a badass? Or at least maybe you’ve accomplished some cool stuff at your job? Nope, you aren’t and you haven’t. Know why? Because you haven’t flown six Astra HD8 8×6 heavy duty trucks over the Swiss Alps via cable tramway to service a hugely ambitious tunneling and power plant project. That is unless you work at Groupement Marti Implenia.
Here’s the idea, pump water up into a reservoir inside a hollowed out mountain during low-consumption hours and then use gravity to generate power later. To do this you need to move a lot of rock — a lot. Naturally this means you need some big-ass trucks, trucks like the Astra HD8 8×6. Getting to the jobsite is a whole different matter though. The site is over 6,500 feet above sea level and there are only two way to get there: by cable tram or helicopter.
The Astra HD8 exists outside the capabilities of heavy lift helicopters, so the tram it was. Six of these beasts were hooked to the tram and moved all the way up the mountain, making the engineers and rigging workers behind this feat total and complete badasses. This is indisputable.
BigLorryBlog
Greg Kachadurian
This IS incredibly cool. As a mining fanatic, I'd love to see the big stope they're hollowing out in that mountain, I get off on this kind of thing. Fun fact: the first cable tramways were developed to service mines located in mountainous areas, and were gravity driven by the buckets of ore descending. The miners would ride up in the empty buckets to get to work. The first chairlifts were modified from bucket trams.
cool fun fact! At the mall at Christmas time (gag) I have always wondered if the elevators could use the same theory, power the ones going up, by the ones going down, using only a minimum of power.
gonna check out that new series "Coal" on Spike?
http://www.spike.com/shows/coal
But are they going to make giant skis to send the trucks back down?
Know the Swiss, I am confident they are better secured than this….
[youtube RvufU5rd6d0 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RvufU5rd6d0 youtube]
Well I work at Group..eeee..me… me.. ment Maa..rti Imple… menia. I'm the lead tunnegineer on the project.
I am clearly lying.
I am pretty sure I had a Hot Wheels, maybe Matchbox but "Not Bloody Likely", set that did this.
Remain seated please. Permaneced sentados por favor.