Humongous Moves

USS Kittiwake operated as a Navy submarine rescue vessel for nearly 50 years before being decommissioned in 1994. Now she’s being transformed into an artificial reef and underwater adventure for sports divers to explore. She must survive the trek from Norfolk, VA to the Cayman Islands and sink on target to land upright on the Caribbean Sea floor. Meet the teams in charge of this titanic task and follow their 1,600-mile journey through winter storms and huge swells.

A vintage aircraft collector’s childhood dream of flying a British Supermarine Spitfire is about to come true. After spending $2.5 million buying and restoring the iconic WWII fighter, the next challenge is getting it over the Atlantic to its new home in Maryland. The plane can’t carry enough fuel to fly to the U.S., so a team of engineers must dismantle the classic aircraft, ensure it survives a 4,000-mile voyage, then reconstruct it to make it airworthy once more.

In the early 1940s, Winston Churchill exported 20 Stanier 8F locomotives to Turkey to encourage the country’s neutrality in WWII. Now, after 70 years away from the U.K., two of these classic trains are heading back home. Follow a team of train enthusiasts as they struggle to haul these two historic engines 850 miles across Turkey’s remote, mountainous terrain.

Two teams of heavy haulers face two massive jobs involving a vintage submarine attack aircraft from the Cold War and a railroad snowplow built in 1925. First, the last airworthy Fairey Gannet has to hitch a ride out of Goose Bay Airbase in Canada aboard the Antonov-124 cargo aircraft. Meanwhile, in Oregon, a team of movers fights gravity and narrow roads to pull the Union Pacific snowplow locomotive up the treacherous “Train Mountain.” Will both mammoth machines survive these perilous journeys and reach their new homes in one piece?

A flotilla of trimaran and monohull yachts are lined up for the Route du Rhum, a transatlantic race spanning 4,000 miles from France to the Caribbean. For the skippers who make it to the tropical finish line, they’ll face another challenge almost as big as the race itself: how to transport their boats back home in the ocean’s notorious winter storms. Follow the moving crew as they attempt to fit 17 yachts worth over $10 million aboard a massive cargo ship in order to bring them back to Europe.

In Chile, 16,400 feet above sea level, astronomers, engineers, and technicians are building the world’s biggest telescope, a scientific wonder capable of gazing into the farthest reaches of the universe. Follow two massive moves—one to haul a huge dish 7,000 miles from its factory in France to the Atacama Desert, and the other to carry the antenna up a desert mountain aboard a custom-designed, 28-wheeled transporter.