A very special première took place in the heart of Berlin in mid April: A Wirtgen W 2200 with a 3.80 m wide FCS milling drum unit was in operation in Germany for the first time. On Berlin’s “Straße des 17. Juni” (Street of June 17), where hundreds of thousands of fans celebrated during the Football World Cup, more than a million people danced at the Love Parade, and top athletes put in top performance regularly at the famous Berlin Marathon, the most powerful cold milling machine in Wirtgen’s product portfolio put in top performance as well.

The “Straße des 17. Juni” is one of Berlin’s major traffic arteries. Average traffic is as high as 50,000 vehicles per day, so that pavement damages are inevitable. Extensive cracking and deformation, as well as countless patches on the almost 1,000 m long, 8-lane section in the borough of Charlottenburg-Wilmersdorf spoke for themselves. Not only the 5 cm thick asphalt surface course but also part of the underlying concrete base layer had to be milled off in order to maintain the high quality of the road pavement in the long term. The operation had to be carried out under tremendous pressure of time, as the entire width of this highly frequented east-west corridor was to be opened to traffic again as early as possible. The main contractor “Arge Straßenbau 17. Juni”, under the technical aegis of Trapp Infra Berlin GmbH, and their Dutch partner Freesmij therefore decided to use a large Wirtgen milling machine model W 2200 equipped with a 3.80 m wide milling drum.

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