Böhlen is a town in Saxony, Germany, south of Leipzig. Its main features are a small airport and a power plant. It is located in the newly built Neuseenland, the lakes created in former open-pit mining areas.
Surface mining, including strip mining, open-pit mining and mountaintop removal mining, is a broad category of mining in which soil and rock overlying the mineral deposit are removed, in contrast to underground mining, in which the overlying rock is left in place, and the mineral is removed through shafts or tunnels.
Bagger 288, built by the German company Krupp for the energy and mining firm Rheinbraun, is a bucket-wheel excavator or mobile strip mining machine.
A bucket-wheel excavator (BWE) is a large heavy equipment machine used in surface mining.
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.
The Berzdorfer See or Lake Berzdorf is located at the southern city limits of Görlitz in Upper Lusatia. It consists of the residual hole of the former Berzdorf open-cast lignite mine, which was flooded from 2002 to the beginning of 2013. The lake forms the southeastern corner of the Lusatian Lake District. With its volume of about 330 million cubic meters and a water depth of max. 72 meters on an area of 960 hectares, it is one of the largest lakes in Saxony. Its name derives from the small village Berzdorf, which was devastated in 1969/70.
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.
The Miraš open-cast coal mines are lignite coal mines in Kosovo operated by the Kosovo Energy Corporation (KEK).
P&H Mining Equipment designs, builds and supports a line of drilling and material handling machinery marketed under the "P&H" trademark and applied to minerals and energy surface mining operations worldwide. The firm is an operating subsidiary of Joy Global Inc. In 2017 Joy Global Inc. was acquired by Komatsu Limited of Tokyo, Japan, and is now known as Komatsu Mining Corporation and operates as a subsidiary of Komatsu.
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.
Spreaders in mining are heavy equipment used in surface mining and mechanical engineering/civil engineering. The primary function of a spreader is to act as a continuous spreading machine in large-scale open pit mining operations.
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.
Bertzit Tower is an investment ruin in the north of Kahla, which belongs to Plessa in the southern part of Brandenburg, itself part of the Elbe-Elster region.
The Bergheider See, south of Finsterwalde near Lichterfeld in the county of Elbe-Elster in Germany, is a flooded pit from the former open cast mine of Klettwitz-Nord, northeast of the Lower Lusatian Heath. The lake was named after the old village of Bergheide, which had to be abandoned for the brown coal pit.
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.
