When its construction was completed in 1978, Bagger 288 superseded Big Muskie as the heaviest land vehicle in the world, at 13,500 tons.[1] It took five years to design and manufacture and five years to assemble, with total cost reaching $100 million.[2] In 1995, it was itself superseded by the slightly heavier Bagger 293 (14,200 tons).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.
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[3] or 240,000 cubic metres of overburden daily[4]– 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. The Bagger's operation requires 16.56megawatts of externally supplied electricity.[5] 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.[5]
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.[6][7]
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.[8]
In the Book After the Revolution by Robert Evans, the post-human city "The City of Wheels" is built on a Bagger 288.[9]
A dragline excavator is a piece of heavy equipment used in civil engineering and surface mining.
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 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, and the shovel was dismantled in February 2007.
A bucket-wheel excavator (BWE) is a large heavy equipment machine used in surface mining.
Big Muskie was a coal mining Bucyrus-Erie dragline excavator owned by the Central Ohio Coal Company, weighing 13,500 short tons (12,200 t) and standing nearly 22 stories tall. It operated in the U.S. state of Ohio from 1969 to 1991.
The Sophienhöhe is the largest artificial hill worldwide, created by surface mining at the open cast lignite mine Tagebau Hambach operated by RWE Power AG in Düren (district), North Rhine-Westphalia, Germany.
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.
The Landkreuzer P 1500 Monster was a purported German pre-prototype super-heavy self-propelled gun designed during World War II. While it is mentioned in a number popular works about World War II projects, there is no solid documentation for the program’s existence, and it may have only been a semi-serious proposal, or even an outright hoax.
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 Seawise Giant, 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 in 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.
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.
Ende Gelände 2018 were a series of events of a mass movement for climate justice in the Rhenish lignite mining area in Germany. The non-violent direct action civil disobedience events were targeted against coal-based power generation through RWE Power AG and demanded the "immediate fossil fuel phase-out" based on climate justice and climate change mitigation.
Bagger 1473 is a bucket-wheel excavator left abandoned in a field in the municipality of Schipkau in Germany.
The Meuro mine was a former open-cast mine located in the state of Brandenburg, Germany that was in operation from 1958 to 1999. It was a source of lignite, often referred to as brown coal, which was used in local factories and power stations. It was one of a number of mines in the Lusatia area which left a massive water debt when the water was pumped out for the operation of the mine. This had to be remediated by the company, Lausitzer und Mitteldeutsche Bergbau-Verwaltungsgesellschaft (LMBV), a state-owned company. The area was flooded and converted into a multi-use recreation and tourism area.
The Rheinisches Braunkohlerevier, often called the Rhenish mining area, is a lignite mining area or district in the Cologne Bay, on the northwestern edge of the Rhenish Slate Mountains. The mining of lignite using the open pit method has had a significant impact on the landscape here and led to the formation of several important industrial sites. The area includes the Zülpicher and Jülicher Börde, the Erft lowlands and the Ville, making it the largest lignite mining area in Europe. To a lesser extent clay, silica sand and loess are mined here. The area is the only active lignite mining area in what was West Germany during German partition and contains the mines with the largest surface area, greatest depth, and biggest annual output of coal.
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