Crane Shipping

How Cranes Are Actually Shipped

The trailer follows the crane type. Carry deck cranes in the 8 to 25 ton class load onto flatbeds or step decks and move on standard or simple oversize permits. Rough terrain cranes are not highway legal, so they ride removable gooseneck (RGN) trailers, often at 60,000 to 120,000 pounds with the boom pinned over the deck. Truck-mounted boom trucks can sometimes be driven, but most owners put them on a lowboy to save the miles and the chassis. Crawler cranes are a different job entirely: they are dismantled and moved as a convoy of loads, from the carbody and crawler tracks to lattice boom sections and counterweight stacks.

Counterweights, Booms, and Multi-Load Moves

Weight is the lever that controls crane transport cost. Stripping counterweights and boom sections can pull the main load below a permit threshold, and those components then travel on ordinary flatbeds at standard rates. A mid-size crawler crane commonly breaks into 5 to 10 truckloads, and large lattice crawlers can run 20 or more. SAC coordinates the whole set as one project through our oversized heavy equipment program, sequencing the loads so the assist crane and riggers are not standing idle at either end.