Big, bigger, biggest
There are few things that appeal more to one’s imagination than the transport of large and/or heavy items. Transformers, turbines, silos, boilers, aircraft sections, locomotives, helicopters etc. can often only reach their destination by ship due to limitations in road and rail transport. 

In the UK, the Concorde from Heathrow Airport was transported down the River Thames and around Britain’s coast  to the UK’s National Museum of Flight at East Fortune in Scotland on Britain's largest-ever inland carrying vessel, the seagoing ‘multi-purpose pontoon’ Terra Marique. On the continent, the last supersonic plane also travelled to its final destination in Germany, the Auto & Technik Museum in Sinsheim, from Karlsruhe on a pontoon barge over the Rhine and road in a two-day journey.

Airbus's latest airplane, the A380, is manufactured in various sites all over Europe,  Germany, the UK, France, and Spain. A multi-mode transport system was set up to deliver all sections in the final assembly facility in Toulouse. Some parts travel by barge in the UK and Germany, and their last inland waterway section of the route starts in the seaport of Pauillac, Bordeaux from where two dedicated vessels complete a 95km journey over the Garonne to the river port of Langon, making use of advanced river information services as the river has not been used for commercial navigation since the beginning of the 20th century.

Alstom opted for multimodal transport to carry the load of 40 new metro rail carriages from France to Finland. The first stretch was executed via inland waterways from Lauterburg on the Rhine to the seaport of Zeebruges. The metro trains were loaded onto a short sea vessel for onward transport to its final destination, Helsinki.