Laninga's Travel Blog

Driving down the road we saw this monstrosity, parked alongside the road:

Yes, this is a truck parked alongside the road

Apparently, it is some sort of generator component used in a power plant near Houston.  They are transporting this over 100 miles, over some of the larger secondary roads.  When they move, they move slowly — and shut down the highway locally.   Fortunately, we passed while it was in one of its rest modes along the side of the roadway.

Some of the wheel "subtrucks"

I don’t know how many wheels there were in total, but my guess well over 320.  Many of these were on outriggers as shown above. There were about 20 of these outrigger trucks per side, each with 8 wheels.  That makes 160 wheels.  Then there were trailing supports and front supports, probably 60 wheels.  Then there were the main supports, probably another 100.  So I have revised my guess to over 320 wheels.

Detail of one of the truck wheel sets

I’ve added (since the original post) the picture of the wheel “truck”, as I found this interesting.  Check out all the hydraulics and other “stuff” they use to run this thing.  Brings up several questions, like how to keep all those trucks aligned and going in the same direction!

There were also at least 4 tractor trucks, don’t know if they all pushed/pulled at the same time or not but suffice it to say this was quite a load.  I did see a news article about this rig, and if memory serves it will take 3 days to move the 100 miles or so.