From a distance it seems as if the paths in „Rheingarten“, the most popular park in Cologne, Germany, extending between the old part of the town and the river Rhine, are covered with a fine sand. But people strolling around and cyclists alike are surprised to see that it is asphalt, to be even more exact a sand-coloured asphalt. These pathways built by contractor Von der Wettern GmbH from Cologne with a VÖGELE SUPER 800 paver received a decorative finish in April 2006 at the end of a project executed to protect the historic old part of the city of Cologne from flooding as river levels rose from a normal of 10m to 11.3m.

For this purpose, lawns and grass areas in „Rheingarten Park“ had been cleared away and preparations were made in the soil underneath, right up to the tunnel following the banks of the Rhine, for swift installation of a mobile high-water protection system consisting of floodwalls. After completion of this extensive construction work, the park with lawn areas and paths for pedestrians and cyclists was laid out anew. In the event of future inundation, this area will be flooded by the river Rhine as levels rise above the 9.5m mark. Therefore, paved paths were a must. For reasons of aesthetics, the planners opted for a coloured asphalt having the looks of sand. As a material, asphaltic concrete (0/5) was used, obtained from a light sand-coloured stone, with addition of a special binder which in the present case was SüBit Color. SüBit Color is a coloured thermoplastic resin binder added to the aggregate in the mixing plant during manufacture of the mix in the place of the normal binder used in road construction. Depending on the colour of the pigment selected for addition to the clear resin binder, a wide range of asphalt colours can be prepared, virtually any colour you can imagine.

For preparation of the light-coloured mix, the mixing plant had been cleaned thoroughly, and so were feed lorries hauling the mix, mechanical shovels and other tools involved in the job before getting in touch with the yellow mix. The VÖGELE SUPER 800 paver, too, was spick and span when surfacing the pathways between „Deutzer Brücke“ and „Hohenzollernbrücke“. For the paths 2.5 to 3.2m wide, the decorative finish was laid in a thickness of 2 to 4cm. Feed with mix was from a feed lorry, by mechanical shovel, into the paver’s material hopper holding up to 5 tonnes. On the job, the paving team made frequent use of the small paver’s separately folding hopper sides when it came to smoothly getting round trees, a pavilion and other obstacles in the paver’s way on the one hand, and dumping the mix right onto the conveyors on the other.

The small paver was praised by the paving team, residents and park visitors alike for its low noise levels, a valuable advantage adding considerably to the acceptance of inner-city applications. The VÖGELE SUPER 800 owes low noise emission to propulsion by a Deutz engine offering ECO Mode, a fan driven hydraulically at variable speed and several other smart details related to air routing.

The job was divided into several sections separated by stairs and sett paved areas. Thanks to a narrow track gauge of just 1.1m, the small compact paver easily managed to drive on the narrow paths to reach the next section. The paver operator profited from the machine‘s hydraulic traction drive allowing extremely sensitive steering and easy manoeuvring. Both during manoeuvring and while paving, the user-friendly SUPER 800 scored in terms of low noise levels. When operating in ECO Mode, the modern construction machine not only is extremely quiet, much to the contractor’s delight it also features remarkably low fuel consumption.

The paving team took great care not to soil the light-coloured, decorative finish. They avoided stepping on the freshly placed surfacing which would have involved the risk of contamination with chippings from also freshly sett paved areas. But notwithstanding these self-imposed restrictions, the SUPER 800‘s screed could be handled as easily as usual.

VÖGELE developed this paver for quick and high-quality handling of landscaping projects, small-scale paving jobs or inner-city applications in confined spaces. „With the highly versatile SUPER 800, our paving team comfortably managed to place a total of 60 tonnes of mix on some 900 square metres within just half a working day, even though the machine had to be moved on site repeatedly.“ With these words Frank-Wilhelm Strick, operations manager of contractor Von der Wettern GmbH, commented on the successful paver concept emphasizing the company’s high satisfaction with the paver’s performance on this job.

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