ALE Brand Guidelines: Abnormal Load Engineering, 1983–2020, Now Part of Mammoet

A British haulier of very large things.

ALE stood for Abnormal Load Engineering, the plain description of its trade: moving and lifting loads too big or too heavy for ordinary transport. English Wikipedia gives its founding as 1983 in the United Kingdom and names Roger Harries as founder. The company’s global headquarters were at Hixon, in Staffordshire, and its research and development division was at Breda, in the Netherlands, the encyclopedia says. Trade reports such as Vertikal.net and The Construction Index referred to the company by the short form ALE.

That Dutch base came through acquisition. The Construction Index reported in July 2019 that ALE, “though British in origin,” had had substantial Dutch engineering behind it since buying the Breda firm Lastra in 2002. English Wikipedia lists further purchases: Brambles Heavy Contracting in 2002, the distribution services division of Alstom in 2005 and the British firm John Gibson Projects in 2007.

In July 2017, Vertikal.net reported that ALE had bought Conbit, a Dutch offshore engineering and lifting contractor set up in 1993 and based in the compound of Eindhoven University of Technology, which served oil and gas and wind power work on and offshore. ALE’s global managing director, Mark Harries, said the purchase let the company combine its skills with Conbit’s to fill gaps in its expertise. By 2019 The Construction Index described him as group managing director and co-owner. English Wikipedia says the company had more than 40 branches around the world.

Cranes, jacks and barges of its own design.

ALE designed much of the equipment it used. The Construction Index noted in 2019 that both ALE and Mammoet “design and produce their own heavylift engineering equipment.” English Wikipedia groups ALE’s kit into transport, ballast, jacking, skidding, weighing and crane systems, with barges and bespoke equipment, and says the most advanced items formed its Innovation Series.

Its crane line was the AL.SK range. English Wikipedia dates the AL.SK190 to 2008 and the AL.SK350 to 2013, with an AL.SK700 configuration for heavier work. The Mega Jack, launched in 2011, is a self-erecting set of jacking towers with hydraulic jacks in their bases; the encyclopedia gives the full system a capacity of 52,000 tonnes to a height of 25 metres. Two smaller Mega Jack 800 systems followed in 2014 and 2017. The Hydro Deck, a barge launched in 2014 by AG&P ALE Ventures for loading heavy cargo where tides vary, was first used on the Ichthys LNG project in Darwin, Australia, English Wikipedia says.

Its most visible British job was in west London. In March 2017 Construction Enquirer reported that the enabling-works contractor Keltbray had called on a 120-metre crane designed and manufactured by ALE to lift 61 portal beams from above the London Underground lines at the Earls Court redevelopment. The largest beam weighed 1,500 tonnes, and the paper called the crane the largest-capacity lifting crane ever used in London. The paper said the crane would work only within the site, without swinging over neighbouring properties, and that removing the beams would take place overnight, after the last District Line train had passed through the tunnels beneath them. English Wikipedia also lists ALE’s work on the polar research ship RRS Sir David Attenborough.

Design and documentation.

Heavy-lift and project-cargo carriers sell something that is hard to show before it happens: the movement of a single object too large or too heavy for a container. Their websites lean on photographs of their own ships and cargo instead, heavy-lift vessels with paired cranes, decks loaded with modules, port cranes or offshore structures, published by the companies themselves as records of past voyages.

Colour carries much of the identity. Company names are painted large on hulls and crane booms, and across this sector the wordmarks often appear in strong orange, blue or red against white superstructures and dark hulls, so that they read from a quayside or in an aerial photograph. The same few colours then tend to run through the livery, the website and the printed material.

Fleet pages sit at the centre of these sites. Ships are grouped by class and described by crane capacity, deck area and deadweight: Jumbo lists its vessels as K3000, J1800 and H800 classes, and BigLift divides its fleet into heavy-lift types and heavy transport vessels such as the MC-Class. Engineering and transport services, from stowage planning to ship-motion analysis, are presented beside the fleet as a second product.

The rest of a typical site is evidence and reach: project-reference galleries sorted by market, from mining to offshore energy and port development; customer magazines and news of ships on order; and office maps showing sales and agency networks across several continents. This guide sets out what can be checked about each company, its founding, its ownership and its fleet, and marks clearly what rests on the company’s own word.

Absorbed into Mammoet in 2020.

ALE no longer trades as a separate company. On 26 July 2019, The Construction Index reported that it had signed an agreement to be taken over by Mammoet of the Netherlands, with terms undisclosed and closing subject to competition approval; until then the two would operate strictly independently. The magazine called Mammoet, ALE and Belgium’s Sarens “the big three European specialists in ultra heavy lifting,” which made the merger of two of them big news in the trade. English Wikipedia says the second generation of owners did not intend to continue with the business.

Mammoet announced that the acquisition was completed on 8 January 2020, and said the businesses would “now operate as one company under the Mammoet brand.” Heavy Lift & Project Forwarding International reported the completion the same day. Mammoet said a full integration plan would be rolled out over the following months, and that Michael Birch, until then a member of ALE’s executive board, had joined Mammoet’s executive board as chief commercial officer. In the same release Mammoet named the SK crane range and the Mega Jack among the innovations of the combined business, so equipment names that ALE built up continued inside its new owner.

The ALE name now survives mainly in that equipment, in project records and in trade-press archives. Its logo, typeface and colours are not set out in the dated sources used here, so the tones on this page are our own, chosen to suggest steel and the amber lights of a road convoy.

For a design guide, ALE shows a brand built on a three-letter abbreviation of a long technical name, and how such a brand is folded into a larger one after a takeover. Compare Mammoet, the Dutch company that absorbed it, and Sarens, the third of the big three named in 2019. For this guide we use a navy, a steel mist and an amber with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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