Located in the middle of the United States, at the western tip of the Great Lakes, Duluth is the largest port on the Great Lakes and, by way of the St. Lawrence Seaway System, a vital connecting point from ports around the world to farms in Minnesota and North Dakota, coal mines in Montana, taconite on the Iron Range just north of Duluth, and in this case, to an oil sands extraction project in Northern Alberta.

A giant facility is being constructed there to extract crude oil from the vast oil sands deposits in the area. It takes about 2 tons of oil sands to produce one barrel of oil. And that kind of work takes very heavy equipment. Some of that equipment was picked up by two Dutch flagged heavy lift ships, the Stellaprima and the Fairlane. Starting in Japan, they picked up project equipment in Malaysia, India, Italy and the Netherlands and brought it to Duluth in late 2005. Both ships were discharged onto four separate trains that transported the material to the project site in Northern Alberta.

One of the trains comprised one car, the Schnabel 800, the world’s largest capacity railcar. It carried one 805 ton piece. Most of the remaining freight was carried by a record-setting rail shipment of 61 rail cars. This is a story of that discharge … Click here to buy