Massive Zurich building completes 19-hour trip (2012) | Hacker News Reader

Massive Zurich building completes 19-hour trip (2012)

swissinfo.ch

132 pointswglb28 comments

Moving heavy things is quite routine. Mammoet [1] is one of the leading companies in that business. One of their unusual tools are fleets of Self-Propelled Modular Transporters. These are wheeled self-propelled platforms with hydraulic lifts. All wheels are powered, steerable, and liftable. [2] Each platform can lift 44 tons per axle. These can be ganged together to make big moving platforms. Hundreds can be ganged together if necessary. They're all coordinated by onboard computers, so that one person with a wired remote can control the whole system.[3]

As a company, Mammoet is unusual. The company has been in business for over 200 years. The headquarters is in the Netherlands, in a round building called "The Bollard", which they moved once. (Yes, the whole building.) They operate all over the world. They have seven locations in the US alone. Because of the nature of their business, they run a training academy and have very well trained people. Their basic approach is to plan very carefully, be very cautious, and then do the big job very smoothly. Mammoet is the opposite of "move fast and break things". They move slowly and don't break things. Yet they usually finish ahead of schedule and under budget.

They're hiring.

[1] http://www.mammoet.com/ [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wL3YvOe0ZgE [3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ER7JKXYdIhY

That is the smoothest pitch I've had the pleasure of reading

I have no connection with Mammoet. I just like the way they deal with difficult and dangerous jobs with very little drama.

I always wonder how GIS databases deal with that (since often they have the notion that buildings of this size "never" move). And I'm not only impressed with the engineering feat, but how the public and the owner worked together on a solution with both were ok with. In the US it would have sat in litigation for 15 years while no railroad work was done, and eventually the building would just be torn down even though the rail project had long since been abandoned. (ok maybe that is too cynical)

That's unrealistic as it implies we actually have rail projects in the US.

Under construction right now: California High Speed Rail bridge at the Fresno River.[1]

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZmrGlu485RY

They probably just model it as the building being torn down and a new one appearing. I don't think there are any inherent properties to a building that needs to persist across a move?

Buildings are getting moved all the time, also in the US: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Structure_relocation

That Wikipedia link has a reference to the relocation of the Cape Hatteras lighthouse [1]. The way the article is written, it sounds like the light characteristic didn't change when it was moved.

I don't have any pre-1999 charts of the area to confirm the old characteristic, but that's surprising if true. It's one thing to have a bit of a Google Maps snafu when a building moves, but relocating a lighthouse and keeping its characteristic the same seems like it's just asking for groundings.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cape_Hatteras_Light

> since often they have the notion that buildings of this size "never" move

I fact OP probably got this from one of these "Falsehoods programmers believe about X" (probably this one: http://wiesmann.codiferes.net/wordpress/?p=15187&lang=en). It's always interesting how even the most basic assumptions contain caveats.

OpenStreetMaps seems to show the building in the new position.

https://www.openstreetmap.org/search?query=oerlichon#map=17/...

Here's the change, about 1 week after the article was published. https://www.openstreetmap.org/changeset/11751043 The commit doesn't have a comment, but a new field 'note: position after movement estimated' was added by the committer. A year later another mapper added building color and material, last year a mapper added the full address and today somebody added the building name "Oerlikon" because that's what people usually refer to (Openstreetmap's search updates almost minutely).

There's no technical enforcement of the persistence though. It could be the same objects with different coordinates, completely new objects or objects that used to be a lake and are now a building.

So you can say that OpenStreetMap doesn't formally model the move, but it might be reflected in the changes to the objects that make up the building.

I wouldn't be surprised if other systems are similar in not actually modeling moves specifically but having some evidence for a move in the data (maybe just a human readable note of the move).

>In the US it would have sat in litigation for 15 years while no railroad work was done, and eventually the building would just be torn down even though the rail project had long since been abandoned. (ok maybe that is too cynical)

[0]

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raising_of_Chicago

Good link.

A ridiculously awesome engineering project made to be routine: Never a day passed during my stay in the city that I did not meet one or more houses shifting their quarters. One day I met nine.

And here is an illustrated history linked by the above page: http://www.chicagomag.com/Chicago-Magazine/August-2010/Raisi...

> I always wonder how GIS databases deal with that (since often they have the notion that buildings of this size "never" move).

Stuff moves all the time, so it really depends on how accurate you need to be. For example, if you're a surveyor you need to make some pretty significant adjustments after major earthquakes. Here is the deformation model that applied after the Christchurch, New Zealand earthquakes:

https://data.linz.govt.nz/layer/1685-nzgd2000-deformation-mo...

More info: http://www.linz.govt.nz/land/surveying/canterbury-earthquake...

In this case you'd just shift the polygon and be done with it. The hairy question is do you retain the logical relationship of the building to it's physical outline. Modelling the real world is hard.

This project is part of the expansion of Bahnhof Oerlikon. The "durchmesserlinie" is the tunnel [2] that ends/starts at Bahnhof Oerlikon and goes to the Main Station which got a new underground train station[1]. Oerlikon had to have two additional tracks added which required the moving of the historic building.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Z%C3%BCrich_Hauptbahnhof#L.C3....

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weinberg_Tunnel

[3] http://www.tagesanzeiger.ch/extern/storytelling/sbb/assets/i...

[4] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UK3ZWcMQ2qs (German)

My father worked for a swiss company exclusively dedicated to move buildings from one place to another, like 20 years ago. I remember his anxiety when he was responsible for the transportation of this old church in Lucerne. He eventually came back to his home country and now restores medieval buildings to become summer houses for the rich.

Moving brick buildings is extremely tricky because brick is absolutely unforgiving when it comes to dealing with tensile stress. Super impressive this.

7600 ton apartment building moved in romania in the 80's http://i.imgur.com/89bfkSI.jpg

Impressive.

I also thought someone was having a laugh when they told me about the Raising of Chicago.

> During the 1850s and 1860s engineers carried out a piecemeal raising of the level of central Chicago. Streets, sidewalks and buildings were either built up, relocated, or physically raised on hydraulic jacks or jackscrews. The work was funded by private property owners and public funds.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raising_of_Chicago

Moving massive buildings was quite common in Romania during the communist regime, to make room for large boulevards: https://www.reddit.com/r/HistoryPorn/comments/29b7pi/moving_...

I remember when this building was moved in Warrington (UK) in 1981:

http://www.engineering-timelines.com/scripts/engineeringItem...

Less impressive, but they moved a historic tavern in Auckland, NZ, recently to make way for a cut & cover motorway tunnel.

http://www.newshub.co.nz/nznews/time-lapse-video-of-birdcage...

Pricy, but I'm glad they kept the landmark.

They moved the Museum Art Hotel in Wellington in 1993. At 3000 tonnes it's half the weight of the Zurich building, but they moved it 120m, which is twice as far. Pretty impressive!

http://www.stuff.co.nz/dominion-post/news/wellington/9054381...

[2012]

Thanks--fixed.

Possible inspiration: https://youtu.be/7YUiBBltOg4?t=46 (Monty Python = Accountancy Shanty )

And "up" was probably the inspiration for the helium balloons on top :)

Heh. I once migrated a 1GB database from MySQL to Postgres. That was cool too.

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