250 Tonnes. No Lifting Points. One Working Route.
About This Project
How AGF Shipping moved a 250-tonne steel press from a Sheffield warehouse to Houston, Texas — with no fixtures to lash it, an off-centre load, and a UK motorway that had to close to let it through.
The Brief
July 2018. A client needed a 250-tonne steel press — 8.5m x 3.85m x 4m — moved from a Sheffield production site to Houston, USA. On paper, a large but conventional heavy-lift job.
A site visit told a different story.
The Problem
The press had almost nothing to work with:
– **No proper lifting points or fixtures** to lash or secure it to a trailer or vessel
– **An off-centre load** — weight distributed 60/40 front to rear, not balanced
– **No usable CAD drawings**, and limited manoeuvring space at the load site
– **A warehouse ceiling too low** for the overhead crane to lift the press directly onto a trailer using slings
Any one of these complicates a heavy-lift job. Together, they meant the standard playbook didn’t apply.
The Plan
With no lifting points and a warehouse that couldn’t clear the height needed for direct sling transfer, we built a lift sequence from scratch:
– Steel stools were brought to the load site so the press could be lifted and held while the overhead crane’s slings were removed
– The trailer itself was lowered to under a metre, reversed carefully beneath the press, then raised again — clearing the press off the stools without ever exceeding road height permits
– The press was heavily lashed for transport, engineered around its uneven weight distribution rather than a standard tie-down
Getting it out of the warehouse and onto UK roads was only step one.
The Route
The road route from Sheffield to Goole port ran into a weight restriction on the slip road from the M18 onto the M62 — not passable in the normal direction of travel.
The solution: a temporary closure of the M62 in both directions, allowing the trailer to join via the off-ramp, travel against the normal flow, then reverse the tractor units mid-carriageway to correct direction before continuing to Goole. The motorway reopened once the load was clear.
At Goole, the press was placed on a coastal vessel bound for Rotterdam, where it was transferred ship-to-ship — via floating crane, working around the same off-centre gravity and uneven lifting points that shaped the load-out — onto the ocean vessel for final transit to Houston.
The Outcome
The press arrived in Houston without incident — the result of a load plan built specifically around a shipment with no standard handling points, not a generic process forced to fit.
Why This Matters to You
If your shipment doesn’t come with lifting points, a balanced load, or a straightforward route, that’s precisely the kind of job AGF is built for. This isn’t a one-off — it’s how we approach project cargo that doesn’t fit a standard container booking or a generalist’s process.