Bagger 288 (Excavator 288), previously known as the MAN TAKRAF RB288[2] built by the German company Krupp for the energy and mining firm Rheinbraun, is a bucket-wheel excavator or mobile strip mining machine.
When its construction was completed in 1978, Bagger 288 superseded Big Muskie as the heaviest land vehicle in the world, at 13,500 tons.[3] It took five years to design and manufacture and five years to assemble, with total cost reaching $100 million.[4] In 1995, it was itself superseded by the slightly heavier Bagger 293 (14,200 tons). XCMG's XGC88000 Crawler Crane remains the largest self-propelled land vehicle in the world, since bucket-wheel excavators are powered by an external power source, and the Overburden Conveyor Bridge F60s hold the title of largest land vehicle of any type by physical dimensions.
Like its siblings, the Bagger 288 require a disproportionately small number of men to operate, at just five total.[1] Whilst Bagger 288 is considered a "sibling vehicle" with Bagger 293, it is unclear if 288 receives the same moniker as 293's Type SRs 8000 by TAKRAF.[5]
Objective
The Bagger 288 was built for the job of removing overburden before coal mining at the Hambach surface mine in Germany. It can excavate 240,000 tons of coal[6] or 240,000 cubic metres of overburden daily[7]– the equivalent of a soccer field dug to 30m (98ft) deep. The coal produced in one day fills 2400 coal wagons. The excavator is up to 220m (721ft) long (slightly shorter than Baggers 287 and 293) and approximately 96m (315feet) high. In fact, the Bagger 288 alongside its siblings, are so large, that it has its own on-board toiletry and kitchenette rooms.[8] The Bagger's operation requires 16.56megawatts of externally supplied electricity.[9] It can travel 2 to 10m (6.6 to 32.8ft) per minute (0.1 to 0.6km/h). The chassis of the main section is 46m (151ft) wide and sits on three rows of four caterpillar track assemblies, each 3.8m (12ft) wide. The large surface area of the tracks means the ground pressure of the Bagger 288 is very small (1.71bar or 24.8psi); this allows the excavator to travel over gravel, earth and even grass without leaving a significant track. It has a minimum turning radius of approximately 50 metres, and can climb a maximum gradient of 1:18 (5° incline).
The Bagger 288 bucket-wheel excavator, beside a Caterpillar Inc. model 824H front end loader for size comparison
The excavating head itself is 21.6m (70ft 10in) in diameter and has 18 buckets each holding 6.6 cubic metres (8.6cuyd) of overburden.
By February 2001, the excavator had completely exposed the coal source at the Tagebau Hambach mine and was no longer needed there. In three weeks it made a 22-kilometre (14mi) trip to the Tagebau Garzweiler, travelling across Autobahn 61, the river Erft, a railroad line, and several roads. The move cost nearly 15 million German marks and required a team of seventy workers. Rivers were crossed by placing large steel pipes for the water to flow through and providing a smooth surface over the pipes with rocks and gravel. Special grass was seeded to smooth its passage over valuable terrain. Moving Bagger 288 in one piece was more economical than disassembling the excavator and moving it piece by piece.
The Bagger 288 is one of a group of similar sized and built vehicles, such as Bagger 281 (built in 1958), Bagger 285 (1975), Bagger 287 (1976), Bagger 293 (1995), etc.[9]
288 and related excavators at the Garzweiler stripmine
In popular culture
In 2009, the British comedian Joel Veitch published a song dedicated to the Bagger 288 on the album Spongs In the Key of Life. In the lyrics of the song, Bagger 288 is built to protect mankind from Godzillas and doom robots from the future. In the music video, the song is accompanied by clips from a German TV documentary about bucket excavators in the Ruhr area.[10][11]
In the film Ghost Rider: Spirit of Vengeance (2012), the rider possesses a Bagger 288, turning it into a fiery vehicle of destruction against his enemies.[12]
In the Book After the Revolution by Robert Evans, the post-human city "The City of Wheels" is built on a Bagger 288.[13]
A dragline excavator is a heavy-duty excavator used in civil engineering and surface mining. It was invented in 1904, and presented an immediate challenge to the steam shovel and its diesel and electric powered descendant, the power shovel. Much more efficient than even the largest of the latter, it enjoyed a heyday in extreme size for most of the 20th century, first becoming challenged by more efficient rotary excavators in the 1950s, then superseded by them on the upper end from the 1970s on.
The Silver Spade was a giant power shovel used for strip mining in southeastern Ohio. Manufactured by Bucyrus-Erie, South Milwaukee, Wisconsin, the model 1950-B was one of two of this model built, the other being its sister ship, the GEM of Egypt. Its sole function was to remove the earth and rock overburden from the coal seam. Attempts to purchase and preserve the shovel from Consol to make it the centerpiece of a mining museum exhibit for $2.6 million fell short. A salvage company began scrapping the machine in January 2009. The boom was dropped using explosives on February 9th, ending any rescue attempts. By March 1st, much of the machine had been cut away.
A bucket-wheel excavator (BWE) is a large heavy equipment machine used in surface mining.
Big Muskie was a dragline excavator built by Bucyrus-Erie and owned by the Central Ohio Coal Company, weighing 13,500 short tons (12,200 t) and standing nearly 22 stories tall. It mined coal in the U.S. state of Ohio from 1969 to 1991. It was dismantled and sold for scrap in 1999.
A landship is a large land vehicle that travels exclusively on land. Its name is meant to distinguish it from vehicles that travel through other mediums such as conventional ships, airships, and spaceships.
TAKRAF Group (“TAKRAF”), is a global German industrial company. Through its brands, TAKRAF and DELKOR, the Group provides equipment, systems and services to the mining and associated industries.
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F60 is the series designation of five overburden conveyor bridges used in brown coal (lignite) opencast mining in the Lusatian coalfields in Germany. They were built by the former Volkseigener Betrieb TAKRAF in Lauchhammer and are the largest movable technical industrial machines in the world. As overburden conveyor bridges, they transport the overburden which lies over the coal seam. The cutting height is 60 m (200 ft), hence the name F60. In total, the F60 is up to 80 m (260 ft) high and 240 m (790 ft) wide; with a length of 502 m (1,647 ft), it is described as the lying Eiffel Tower, making these behemoths not only the longest vehicle ever made—beating Prelude FLNG, the longest ship—but the largest vehicle by physical dimensions ever made by humankind. In operating condition, it weighs 13,600 metric tons making the F60 also one of the heaviest land vehicles ever made, beaten only by Bagger 293, which is a giant bucket-wheel excavator. Nevertheless, despite its immense size, it is operated by only a crew of 14.
Marion 6360, also known as The Captain, was a giant power shovel built by the Marion Power Shovel company. Completed and commissioned on October 15 1965, it was one of the largest land vehicles ever built, exceeded only by some dragline and bucket-wheel excavators. The shovel originally started work with Southwestern Illinois Coal Corporation, but the owners were soon bought out by Arch Coal. Everything remained the same at the mine except for the colors which were changed to red, white, and blue. Like most mining vehicles of extreme size, Marion 6360 only required a surprisingly small amount of men to operate, a total of four consisting of a operator, oiler, welder, and a ground man who looked after the trailing cable.
Bagger 293, previously known as the MAN TAKRAF RB293, is a giant bucket-wheel excavator made by the German industrial company TAKRAF, formerly an East German Kombinat.
The Tagebau Hambach is a large open-pit coal mine in Niederzier and Elsdorf, North Rhine–Westphalia, Germany. It is operated by RWE and used for mining lignite.
The Visonta Coal Mine ([]) is an open pit lignite mine located near Gyöngyös, Heves County, in Hungary. It is the smallest lignite mine in Hungary out of three lignite mines in total. The mine has coal reserves amounting to 400 million tonnes of lignite, one of the largest coal reserves in Europe and the world and has an annual production of 3.9 million tonnes of coal.
A bucket chain excavator (BCE) is a piece of heavy equipment used in surface mining and dredging. BCEs use buckets on a revolving chain to remove large quantities of material. They are similar to bucket-wheel excavators and trenchers. Bucket chain excavators remove material from below their plane of movement, which is useful if the pit floor is unstable or underwater.
A conveyor bridge is a piece of mining equipment used in strip mining for the removal of overburden and for dumping it on the inner spoil bank of the open-cut mine. It is used together with multibucket excavators, frequently bucket chain excavators, that remove the overburden which is moved to the bridge by connecting conveyors. Conveyor bridges are used in working horizontally layered deposits with soft overburden rock in areas where mean annual temperatures are above freezing. They are frequently used in lignite mining.
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The Type SRs 8000 or less commonly known as the SRs 8000-class, is a family of bucket-wheel excavators known for being one of the largest terrestrial vehicles ever made by man, with Bagger 293 its - "lead vessel" - being the largest ground vehicle in history. The Type SRs 8000 classification was coined by TAKRAF to describe specifically, Bagger 293, although it is unclear if this extends to its other "sibling vehicles" within the same bulk.
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