World's Largest Ship Elevator Can Lift Insane Amount Of Weight

It's always fun to see the largest of anything. A ball of yarn. A rocking chair. Well, feast your [...]

By Jameson Brown

It's always fun to see the largest of anything. A ball of yarn. A rocking chair. Well, feast your eyes on the world's largest ship elevator. It's massive in scale and weighs 15,500 tons.

The elevator is located at the Three Gorges Dam opened in Yichang City, in central China's Hubei Province. It can lift a freighter of 3,000 DWT (deadweight ton) and and its vertical range can go all the way to 113 meters high.

Why is an elevator of this size even needed? It allows ships of massive size to get over the dam. Basically, the exact same thing we've all seen on a lake, but multiplied by about a million. See more of the technical specifics from CCTV+ below:

The main components of the structure are four 169-meter high reinforced concrete towers. The chamber, a self-support orthotropic plate structure that is 120 meters long and 18 meters wide, works as a gigantic basin.

A special safety mechanism, or a brake pad, is fixed. Four short screw sections connected to the ship chamber work as rotary locking rods.

They rotary locking rods work continuously in an internal thread, or a nut post, that is fixed to the towers. If an accident occurs, this rotation is blocked and traction is achieved that supports the ship chamber independently.

The elevator will cut journey times for passenger, cruise and small cargo ships passing through the dam from over three hours to about 40 minutes.

Larger vessels still have to pass the dam by means of a two-lane, five-chamber lock chain like climbing stairs. "Large vessels walk the stairs, small ones take the elevator" to pass the Three Gorges Dam for some time to come.

We could watch this thing go up and down all day. It's mesmerizing. But soak it all in while you can, because the chances of ever getting to "ride" one of these things is probably pretty slim.

[H/T YouTube / CCTV+]

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