cars: The World’s Largest Land Machine: The Bagger Digger 288
Hello, and welcome to a brand new Machine of the Week Report.
Now I know I have droned on about electric cars on this show, but what I am going to show you now is at the other end of the electric vehicle spectrum. This machine is entirely electrically powered, but it does use quite a lot of electricity. About the same amount as a mid sized town.
I like diggers. I like being able to move huge lumps of stuff just by twiddling a couple of levers. I’ve seen a few chunky diggers in my time but they were all dwarfed by this baby.
This is the 45,000 ton Bagger 288 digger built by Krupps in Germany, and it is the largest land based machine built by humans on the face of the planet.
It’s not fast, moving at about 2 meters a minute, but boy can it shift rubble.
It can dig up 240,000 cubic meters of dirt a day. That’s about the same as a football field sized hole that’s 30 metres deep.
And why do you need a machine so absurdly big? So we can strip mine coal out of the ground, transport it hundreds of miles on massive trains and take it to power stations where we burn it to make electricity. And where does quite a chunk of this electricity go? Strangely back to the digger, as it requires 16.56 megawatts of electricity to operate. You’re not going to find a lot of solar panels on this leviathan.
Once it starts digging, it literally will not stop. Anything in its path will be chewed up, including this 60 ton bulldozer. How, I ask you, do you miss a 60 ton bulldozer?
‘Klaus, careful of zee bulldozer, oops, too late!’
Anyway, it’s still working, chewing it’s way through the heart of Germany, but obviously it’s a really sensible use of technology, strip mining a finite source of fossil fuel to generate electricity. Yes.
I think I should point out right now that although this monster is in Germany, they are also the European country that builds the most wind turbines and generates over 20% of their electricity using the wind. Nice.
Join me again next time for another Machine of The week Report, and if you have been, thank you for watching.
yours,
Rob
My favorite digger too.
Except … I think it was called “Bagger 288″. I remember because a German colleague of mine, raising his son in Australia, was finding it very embarrassing to take the child out in public. The 2-year old tot was mad about earth-movers, and would scream “Bagger!” when he saw any (including toy ones). It sounded a lot like “Bugger!”, you see.