FTLComm - Tisdale - January 11, 2000

Seen across the shopping mall parking lot the size of this load is apparent. The massive pieces are the full size of the highway surface with sixty-four wheels on a set of dollies as

undercarriage. This is the second of the two units that pulled into Tisdale Monday afternoon on their final leg of a trip from Houston Texas to Hudson Bay Saskatchewan. These pieces are the press that will be the essential part of the new strip plywood plant being built at the bay by Weirhauser and what used to be MacMillan Bloddel. With all of the weight sitting on the rolling gear under each large piece the tractor unit is piled high with concrete slabs to give it

traction but even that is not enough to move this massive unit down the road and up and down hills. A second tractor is fixed onto the back of the boogies as a pusher unit and it also is burdened with concrete blocks. It would stressful enough shepherding a load like this over more then half the length of North America but how much more mind numbing would be trying to scynchronise the back tractor with the load and front one. In this picture you can see the rear unit hooked on to the back and below the push poles are folded back from the back of the huge vehicle. Besides the drivers of the four tractor units a support crew in four pilot trucks made up part of the convoy

that cleared traffic and in this case organised a night parking place before they set out for their final day's trip from Tisdale to Hudson Bay. The Hudson Bay mill is proving to be a major construction project as Northern Steel Industries here in Tisdale has been busily fabricating specialised vessels for the solutions to be used in the process that

is expected to see operating this spring. Unlike the former chip mill this new mill will take strips of poplar (Aspen) fibre and lay it out to form the matrix of the layers and thus produce an extremely strong construction material with the durability of chip board and a strength level greater then conventional plywood. In the mean time we will have to keep our eyes open for more exotic parts that will become part of this new and innovative mill in Hudson Bay.