We mobilised on this one in April 2020. Anyone who was working that month remembers what that meant. The building was new, the scope was clear, and every single thing around the job had just changed.
The client is a national parcel carrier. They were opening a sort depot in Medicine Hat and needed a van line installed before it could take freight. We were engaged through the equipment integrator, with a crew of six and a contract worth a hundred and fifty thousand dollars.
A small job with a hard constraint
Six people is a small crew. On a normal year that is a simple job to run. In the spring of 2020 the constraint was not the work. It was keeping six tradespeople healthy, on site, and productive in a town four hours from home while the rules changed week to week.
We split the crew so that a single case would not take out the whole job. We staged tools so that people were not sharing them. Travel and accommodation got planned around distance rather than cost. None of that is clever. It is just the set of decisions that keeps a small crew intact, and on this job intact was the whole game. Lose two of six and you have lost a third of your capacity with no bench to draw from.
The build itself
A van line is the spine of a small sort depot. Freight comes off the trailer, runs the line, and gets sorted to the outbound vans. It has to be level, it has to be quiet, and the access around it has to let an operator clear a jam without climbing on the frame.
We built the support steel first. Black structural steel, set and levelled along the length of the run, with the conveyor bed landing on top of it. Then the belt sections, the drives, and the guarding.
Access work took a real share of the hours. Yellow stair towers, landings, handrail, and toe plate. Grated treads so nothing collects on them. That is the part of a parcel depot that gets used every shift for twenty years, and it is also the part most likely to be trimmed from a budget by someone who has never worked a night sort.
Working around a building that was still being finished
The depot was not finished when we arrived. Other trades were live in the same space, the overhead doors were going in, and the yard was still being graded. Equipment moved in and out around us all day. A new building looks empty in photographs and is anything but, and the only way to hold a date inside one is to know where every other crew intends to be that week.
That is normal. What is not normal is doing it while limiting how many people share an enclosed space. We sequenced our work to stay out of other crews rather than negotiating the floor daily, which cost us some efficiency and saved us far more in stoppages.
How it finished
The line went in and the depot turned over on schedule. The client told us it was one of the smoothest turnovers they had experienced on a project of that size, and they were specific that this held despite the conditions we delivered it in.
Smooth is an underrated word. It means nothing dramatic happened. No lost time injury, no crew sent home, no rework, no argument at handover. On a small job the margin is thin enough that any one of those turns a profitable project into a loss, and a four month schedule into six.
What a small job teaches
Small crews are fragile and should be planned that way. A thirty person job absorbs a sick day. A six person job does not, and the plan has to say what happens when someone cannot work.
Distance costs more than people budget. Medicine Hat is a long way from a supply house. Every forgotten fitting is most of a day, so we ran a deeper spares kit than the job strictly needed and used almost all of it. We now price regional work with that kit included rather than treating it as a contingency, because on every remote job we have run since, the trip we did not have to make was worth more than the parts sitting in the box.
Access steel is not a line item to trim. We have gone back to sites years later and found the stairs we built still carrying every shift, long after the conveyor above them has been modified twice.
The last point is the one we would give any owner planning a regional depot. A small site does not get a small amount of attention from us. It gets a smaller crew, and the same sequence, the same rigging plans, and the same punch list discipline we would run on a build twenty times the size. The reason that matters is simple. A regional depot has no redundancy. When the line stops, the freight stops with it.
Project Photos
