On tour with the Sean O’Kelley
Something like this doesn’t happen every day: An exhibit is brought from its retirement home in a museum to revive the splendour of the old days once more. In the case of our story, it is the houseboat Sean O’Kelley, which became at least as famous as its inhabitants themselves as the long-time residence of the Kelly Family.
Professional transport help was needed so that the ship could find its way back onto the water: Therefore, a MAN TGX heavy-duty semitrailer tractor from Kübler Transporte and the company’s employees were part of the undertaking and managed the transport of the prominent passenger with professional composure. The team around Nicolas Kübler, the responsible project manager at Kübler, had already accompanied the houseboat into its well-deserved retirement at the Technik Museum Speyer 18 years ago, accompanied by a television crew. “So we knew what to expect,” said Nicolas Grimm, who was part of the team.
Grimm, who has been with Kübler since his apprenticeship days 25 years ago when he was training as a forwarding agent, looks after heavy goods transports of all kinds for the company and on diverse transport routes from water to rail and road. Two of these modes of transport were also on the list for the Sean O’Kelley contract. “A job that was treated as carefully as any other,” Grimm stated plainly.
After he and his team had already accompanied the boat’s journey to the museum, it was no big deal to come up with a concept for the new transport. There were a few sticking points, however: Since the data of the last order was no longer valid after all these years and the requirements also keep changing over time, a new approval order had to be obtained. For this purpose, the route to be covered was reinspected and coordinated with the responsible authorities. This task was taken over by Grimm’s colleague Frieder Saam, another long-time employee at Kübler, who also accompanied the heavy transport as the driver of the MAN TGX 41.680 – under constant observation of the camera team that filmed every metre covered by the Kelly ship for a documentary about the musical family. After successfully loading the vessel, which is 34 metres long, 6.80 metres wide, 7 metres tall and weights 185 tonnes, the journey could begin. The destination was the Braun shipyard in Speyer, about four kilometres away, from where the Sean O’Kelley could set sail on the Rhine a good three hours later.
On the chosen route to the shipyard, driver Frieder had to go around a bridge with insufficient load-bearing capacity in his MAN TGX and take the longer route through the industrial area adjacent to the museum. Of course, there were also some spectators who watched the old boat’s journey from the roadside, but there were no massive crowds to manage. A circumstance that project manager Grimm, for whom the focus is naturally entirely on the smooth running of his jobs, noted positively.
After travelling on land with the MAN TGX, inland waterway vessels took over the further transport of the boat. Nicolas Grimm had organised this maritime voyage on behalf Kübler through an outside company that had the appropriate tugs. For the filming, the Kelly ship finally sailed on its own keel from Cologne to Amsterdam. The documentary accompanies the band on a journey through their past and visits the most important stations of their career. When all the stations were in the can, the ship returned to its anchorage at the Technik Museum Speyer after the end of filming, following the same routes and again with the help of Kübler Transporte. In the history of technology museums, this was the first time that a large exhibit had left the museum grounds and then returned, commented the press spokesperson of the Technik Museum Speyer on the special transport. For Nicolas Grimm, it fell under “normal day-to-day business”.
“Good nerves and the confidence to work and plan in such a way that you can sleep well at night.”
There are plenty of challenges and that is exactly what makes his job at Kübler Transporte so appealing to him: “You don’t know in the morning what the day will bring and that’s the beauty of it.”