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Two ships, 4 trains, some cranes & a song...

Duluth, Minnesota, located at the western tip of the Great Lakes, is the largest port on the Great Lakes and, by way of the St. Lawrence Seaway System, a vital connecting point from ports around the world to farms in Minnesota and North Dakota, coal mines in Montana, taconite on the Iron Range just north of Duluth, and in this case, to an oil sands extraction project in Northern Alberta.
The Long Lake Project, a joint venture with Opti and Nexen, is building a facility there to extract crude oil from oil sands deposits. It takes about 2 tons of oil sands to produce one barrel of oil. That kind of work takes very heavy equipment. Some of that equipment was picked up by two Dutch flagged heavy lift ships, the Stellaprima and the Fairlane. Starting in Japan, they picked up project equipment in Malaysia, India, Italy and the Netherlands and brought it to Duluth in late 2005. Both ships were discharged onto four separate trains that transported the material to the project site in Northern Alberta.
One of the trains comprised one car, the Schnabel 800, the world's largest capacity railcar. It carried one 805 ton piece. Most of the remaining freight was carried by a record-setting rail shipment of 61 rail cars.
On the DVD, you will watch the two ships come under the world famous Duluth Aerial Lift Bridge to get discharged at Lake Superior Warehousing Company onto railcars that would eventually make up 4 separate trains to Canada. The DVD covers the entire discharge in Duluth with additional pictures taken of the trains and from the trains on the way up to Canada. Several pictures are included of the final discharge in Alberta.
The 58 minute DVD contains narration, video and pictures taken by the Duluth Shipping News, a newsletter/web page that covers the shipping scene in Duluth every day of the year. A daily newsletter in the summer, a monthly newsletter by subscription, and an active web site (www.duluthshippingnews.com) mean a lot of pictures of Duluth shipping.
A special feature of the DVD is a song written by Kim Storm especially for and about the project. She researched the song while taking pictures of the project for the Duluth Shipping News.