Wirtgen Group Machines Justify Enormous Trust

For decades now, the family business P.H. Broughton & Sons from Springfield, Illinois, has been a firmly established regional player when it comes to road construction. An essential role in the success of the company is played by Wirtgen Group machines and technologies – plus the service that ensures maximum utilization rates of their equipment. The paving team completed the rehabilitation of an urban thoroughfare with the contractor’s latest investment, a Vögele SUPER 2000-3i paver.

What began over a century ago with the transportation of slate with horses and carts has since become a flourishing medium-sized construction company. Today, P.H. Broughton & Sons Inc. is managed by the third generation of the family, with Josh Broughton at the helm. The contractor’s activities focus primarily on road construction and rehabilitation – from earthworks and asphalt paving to compaction and milling services.

The ongoing success of P.H. Broughton & Sons on the market has a lot to do with a partnership that began many years ago. “After convincing discussions with the people from the Wirtgen Group at the CONEXPO-CON/AGG show some years ago, we decided to invest in a Wirtgen SP 15 slipform paver,” recalls Josh Broughton. “We are only a relatively small construction contractor. But, despite this, the level of support we get from the Wirtgen Group has always been 110 percent. We have never had the feeling of being just a small fish in a big pond. We were always just as important as all their other customers.” Today, the contractor’s fleet has a whole range of Wirtgen Group equipment, and now includes Wirtgen cold milling machines, pavers from Vögele, and Hamm rollers.

The excellent working relationship with their local authorized Wirtgen Group dealer, the Roland Machinery Company, has also paid off for P.H. Broughton & Sons in many ways. “Our two companies have worked together for decades. We know and understand each other very well,” confirms Matt Roland, President of the Roland Machinery Company, “And we always go that extra mile to ensure our customers’ satisfaction. Like with highly qualified service technicians who are always on the ball with the latest technologies when it comes to machines from across the Wirtgen Group. To guarantee this, we make sure they attend annual training sessions at the Wirtgen Group Center for Training and Technology in Nashville, Tennessee, in the off-season.”

Rehabilitation of an Urban Thoroughfare with New Vögele Paver SUPER 2000-3i

Just how good the collaboration between P.H. Broughton & Sons, the Wirtgen Group, and Roland Machinery really is, was shown by the rehabilitation of a main thoroughfare in the State Capital of Illinois. Here in Springfield, the municipal authorities awarded Broughton the contract for the rehabilitation of 1.5 miles (2.4 km) of severely cracked road surface with Portland cement concrete. “Although Chatham Road had been patched several times in the past decades, the existing road surface had now reached the end of its serviceable life,” explained David Whitworth, Construction Engineer for the City of Springfield, Illinois. We checked out a number of different alternatives and finally decided that the best option would be a 2.5 in (6.4 cm) binder course and a 1.5 in (3.8 cm) surface layer.

P.H. Broughton & Sons rolled out their latest investment – a brand new SUPER 2000-3i paver from the Wirtgen Group – for the rehabilitation contract in Springfield. In the development of this 10-foot class road paver, Vögele paid particular attention to the needs of the North American market. The tracked paver unites extreme versatility and high productivity in a solution that is just made for medium-sized operators with a broad spectrum of tasks to fulfill.

The ErgoPlus 3 Operating Concept Speeds Up Familiarization

Steve Christine, an experienced paver operator who worked for many years on an earlier Vögele model, sits at the controls of the new SUPER 2000-3i with a VF 600 screed – a front-mounted extending screed. “You just can’t compare this piece of equipment with what we used to use before. The SUPER 2000-3i makes it so much easier to achieve absolutely level and true to line paving results.”

Thanks to Vögele’s ErgoPlus 3 operating concept, even an old hand like Steve Christine, looking forward to retirement after 46 years in the job, found it easy to get used to working with the new paver. “Learning how to handle the SUPER 2000-3i is pretty easy. I very soon got the hang of it.” And it was no different with Vögele’s automatic leveling system, Niveltronic Plus. All of its functions are controlled from the ErgoPlus 3 screed operator’s console. Interacting with various automatically recognized sensors, Niveltronic Plus delivers precise paving results at the press of a button.

At the construction site in Springfield, the SUPER 2000-3i worked in combination with Vögele’s Big MultiPlex Ski sensor system. Its variable 5–13 m beam can be fitted with three Vögele multi-cell sonic sensors. Distributed over a long measuring distance, these three measuring points enable the system to identify and level out even long surface irregularities. The latest version of the Big MultiPlex Ski is particularly user-friendly – and can be set up and ready to use in only seven minutes.

From the perspective of paver operators, another clear advantage of the SUPER 2000-3i is its comfortable operating platform. “Another feature that makes life for the operator much easier is the ideal overview of the concrete feeding and paving process,” says Steve Christine.

“Continuous development is a key feature of Vögele pavers. That’s what we like about them. Just like rest of the Wirtgen Group, Vögele keeps coming up with new features and technologies that we simply don’t get from many other competing brands,” says Josh Broughton. “They are always on the lookout for things that make life easier for the people that work with their machines. That helps us deliver a better job in a shorter time with the same crew – which in turn enables us to maintain our competitive edge.”

The SUPER 2000-3i Places an Asphalt Mix Reinforced with Kevlar Fibers

Alongside their first-class paving equipment, Broughton also used a special asphalt mix on the construction site in Springfield, Illinois: The specially formulated asphalt mixes for the new asphalt pavement feature properties that provide maximum long-term resistance to wear from heavy traffic. The mixes for both the binder course and the surface layer were reinforced by the addition of Aramid fibers. The synthetic fibers, better known under the name Kevlar, are characterized by a combination of extremely high strength and very low weight, and were employed here to help counteract future cracking of the road surface. The paving crew from P.H. Broughton & Sons processed a total of 6,000 t of hot asphalt mix on the municipal thoroughfare through Springfield.