I used to know a guy who worked for a transportation company that specialized on large transports. Such a transport takes years of planning, coordinating with police, field trips to check the current state because a lot of maps are wrong and so on. Bridges may not be as strong as offically declared. You have to balance the cost of dismantling obstacles against the cost of taking another route or not doing the transport at all.
It's a crazy detailed process with almost no tolerance for mistakes. You really don't want to get stuck with some industrial vessel weighing hundreds of tons.
I do exactly that for a living and you are correct. Years of planning, permits beyond permits beyond permits. Tons of people to coordinate. Street intersections to rebuild. Bridges to analyze. Wires to lift/bury underground.
Starts with a phonecall about moving something ludicrously unpractical to move and a bunch of madlads already finding solutions to move it.
Iirc this was retiring one to a museum. Its end of life would have been set decades before it happened.
Despite what some people would have you believe, the US government is actually capable of long-term planning. You just have to keep the parts of the government that change every two years from screwing that up
Big military contracts are essentially hiring enough people, with enough collective experience, that when everything is coming together you never hear, "huh, I didn't think of that". And they need to do that while also interacting with other organisations who have the same goal... but you can't take thier word for it, so you have to make sure that they've done their due diligence and visa versa. That shit takes a mertic shit ton of tedious beurocracy to get through. Three years sounds pretty efficient.
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u/Below-Average-528 8h ago
I used to know a guy who worked for a transportation company that specialized on large transports. Such a transport takes years of planning, coordinating with police, field trips to check the current state because a lot of maps are wrong and so on. Bridges may not be as strong as offically declared. You have to balance the cost of dismantling obstacles against the cost of taking another route or not doing the transport at all.
It's a crazy detailed process with almost no tolerance for mistakes. You really don't want to get stuck with some industrial vessel weighing hundreds of tons.