Cruising down the river on a Sunday afternoon

This was one of our most unusual and interesting contracts which was carried out for New Covent Garden Soups in the summer of 2008.

It wasn’t quite a cruiser but a barge and not quite a river but a canal.

The mission – take a flat bed pasteurizer/cooler, measuring approximately 18m x 4m x 1.5m out of a plant in San Francisco, USA and reinstall it at factory with very limited access in London – simple! 

This is what happened –

The machine was disassembled and cut into sections approximately 1.5m long, these were containerised and shipped to New Covent Garden Soup factory in Peterborough.

Planet Flowline engineers erected a large industrial tent in the car park and reassembled, modified and tested the unit before breaking it down into sections ready for transport to London.

After clearing the site with very limited access in London, 7 lorries were loaded and travelled on a Saturday morning to a wharf on the Grand Union Canal, where they were loaded and put onto barges.

On Sunday morning, the barges set sail to the back of New Covent Garden Soup factory, where the sections were off loaded and skated into position.

The machine was then reassembled, tested and commissioned and is now producing Covent Garden’s fine range of chilled soups in cartons.