Bagger 288

During the reunion drive Zach asked me what the largest land vehicle in the world was. I immediately knew that it would be some kind of dragline, or bucket excavator, because I worked for someone 15 years ago who used to engineer them. These machines have long since surpassed the size of the NASA Crawler-Transport (the vehicle that was designed to deliver the Saturn V moon rocket to the launch pad) which used to hold the crown. So I told Zach and had to explain what exactly a dragline is.

 

Basically what draglines do is rip up the Earth in search of coal or other mined materials. They are huge strip-mining machines. And the one above, known as "Bagger 288", is their king. Bagger was made by Krupp in 1978 to mine for coal.

 

It weighs 13,500 tons. It requires a crew of 70 to run it. It's impeller scoop is 8 stories tall. It requires an external 16.6 Megawatt power supply to run - a small power plant. And it was designed for one thing: to excavate a site rapidly.

 

Walk up to a piece of land the size of a professional soccer field. Take your shovel and dig up the dirt over the entire field, down to a depth of about 100 feet. That's a huge amount of soil. How long would it take you by hand? How long would it take with conventional power shovels and dump trucks?

 

Bagger 288 can do it in one day.

 

Those huge Terex dump trucks that everyone marvels at? You need a whole fleet of those just to carry off the soil from this monster.

 

As big and scary as Bagger is, the most amazing thing is that it's immense weight is distributed so broadly over its 12 giant caterpillar tracks that it can drive across grass and not even leave a mark.