Over the last hundred years, escalators have often been used in places where large numbers of visitors need to be moved quickly. As an installation specialist, SCHOLPP has been active in the industry since as far back as the 1960s. It can draw on decades of experience and look to the future with great confidence.
“You’ve got to be strong and able to tackle things,” says Marco Krenz, who joined SCHOLPP in 2004 and worked as a fitter installing escalators himself until 2016. “Airports and shopping malls are among our main customers.” Today, he organizes SCHOLPP projects involving the installation or dismantling of escalators and moving walkways. Whereas in the last century, this primarily concerned escalators (also known as moving stairways), now there is increasing demand for moving walkways, which in turn are known as moving pavements or autowalks in the technical jargon. They are not only used to overcome height differences, but also when long horizontal distances come into play, at airports for example, where passenger gates are sometimes hundreds of meters apart.
Marco Krenz was able to learn a great deal from the wealth of experience of the “old hands” in the SCHOLPP teams, with whom he repeatedly faced new and exciting challenges. However, the specialists’ work begins long before the conveyor technology is actually moved into the buildings. “First, we measure out how we can move the equipment in. If the building opening isn’t large enough, it usually goes through the roof, sometimes through the basement,” says Krenz.
A customer inquiry is therefore first followed by a detailed inspection, during which measurements are taken primarily using laser technology and plumb bobs. The staircase to be installed has already been defined at this stage. The relevant technical specifications with possible load-bearing points have been studied and can be compared with the conditions in the destination building by the experts in the SCHOLPP team. Once the moving-in plan is ready, a meeting is held with the building owners to coordinate the implementation and schedule.
Creating mobility, moving people
Many buildings offer little space. What’s more, the work is often complicated by the ongoing activities of other construction projects or even existing passenger flows. SCHOLPP has decades of expertise in precise scheduling and modern technology worth over 25 million euros, so it is excellently equipped to work under such circumstances. The Manghi industrial crane, for example, has a compact design and is therefore perfect for particularly tight spaces. The aluminum gantries are quick and easy to install and offer huge load-bearing capacity, while the so-called escalator jumbo, a complete rolling package for escalator installation, means that everything needed is available on site, including a small workshop. Even if all the ready-made solutions don’t work, what didn’t fit before is made to fit – with special constructions designed specifically for tricky move-in situations.
“We just had a multi-story building where we were responsible for the moving in and basic installation of eight moving walkways,” says Marco Krenz, recalling a unique recent project that once again presented him and his team with a new challenge. “On the lower four floors, we were able to use the building entrance, but on the upper four, we had to go over the roof. Entire walls were in the way on some floors, and we had to take them out.” The experts visited the site several times to take measurements. “It’s imperative that absolutely nothing goes wrong on a construction site like this. Precision work to the millimeter is called for here,” says Karsten Stoppel, senior project manager for escalator installations, proudly adding: “We even made it one day ahead of our own schedule in the end.”
Solving problems that others despair of is one of SCHOLPP’s core competencies. This is one of the reasons why customers from all over the world choose the company time and again: SCHOLPP is renowned for the exceptional reliability of its planning.