Autoliner

A transport to the other side of the globe. The “Höegh Trapper” is the largest automobile transporter in the world—two hundred meters long, thirty-six meters wide. But the major attraction is actually behind the steel hull: A gigantic cargo area: In total, over seventy-one thousand square meters—enough room for eight-thousand-five-hundred cars. And hundreds of the so-called “High and Heavies”: Gigantic machines of any kind. 

Her journey takes the fully loaded “Trapper” on a journey covering 28,000 kilometers. The starting point: Antwerp in Belgium. Here, Port Captain Per Henningsen has to load 1,000 cars in record time – only 16 hours. Next stop: Bremerhaven, in Germany. Besides 2,000 cars here, Per has to load 200 high and heavy units – one of which has him worrying more than usual. He doesn’t know the exact measurements of the mysterious cargo – will it fit into the Trapper?

From Bremerhaven, the journey continues to England, France, and Spain, and then out onto the expanse of the Atlantic Ocean. From there across the pond to ports in the US and Jamaica, through the Panama Canal onto the Pacific and all the way to New Zealand and Australia…All that in just fifty days!

The Panama Canal is the bottleneck of the journey. The canal is over a hundred years old and was designed for the largest ships at that time. Maximum width: 32.3 meters. For behemoths like The Trapper, that’s not enough. Canal authorities began construction on newer, larger lock systems in 2007. Since its opening in 2016, ships belonging to the so-called Neopanamax class can now transit the canal, and that includes the Trapper. But even though the new lock chambers are fifty-five meters wide: For the Trapper, this means not even ten meters clearance on either side - a special challenge for Captain She and his crew…