The Bagger 288 mobile strip mining machine, built by Krupp for the energy and mining firm Rheinbraun, is the world’s largest land vehicle, weighing in at 13,500 tons and standing over 300 feet tall
The Bagger 288, the world’s largest land vehicle, is a colossal excavator that stands taller than the Statue of Liberty and weighs more than the Eiffel Tower.
This bucket-wheel excavator or mobile strip mining machine was constructed by German company Krupp for energy and mining firm Rheinbraun.
Upon its completion in 1978, it overtook Big Muskie as the heaviest land vehicle globally, weighing in at 13,500 tons and standing over 300 feet tall. It took five years to design and manufacture, and another five to assemble, with the total cost amounting to $100 million (£80 million).
The Bagger 288 was specifically built for removing overburden before coal mining at the Hambach surface mine in Germany. It can excavate 240,000 tons of coal or 240,000 cubic meters of overburden daily – equivalent to a football field dug to 30 meters deep.
The coal produced in one day fills 2400 coal wagons. The excavator measures up to 220 meters long and approximately 96 meters high.
Bagger 288 uses its revolving wheel of buckets as a shovel to continually shift 8.5 million cubic feet of dirt a day. Once it reaches a seam of brown coal, or lignite, it can harvest 265,000 tons of fuel a day, reports the Express US.
The Bagger 288 is a feat of engineering (
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(Image: (Image: Getty)))
Over 8,500 square feet of tread carry the Bagger’s 13,000 tons of weight at a leisurely 0.4 miles per hour. The Bagger 288 is so large that it even has its own on-board toilets and kitchenettes.
The machine requires only a team of five to operate, significantly fewer than other machines of its size.
The bucket-wheel is as tall as a seven-story building, with each of its 18 buckets weighing 7,700 pounds when empty. The structure, coated in nearly 90,000 pounds of paint, includes two pylons, each standing at 148 feet tall, and 7,218 feet of steel suspension cables.
The Bagger 288 is part of a series of similarly sized and constructed vehicles, including the Bagger 281 (built in 1958), Bagger 285 (1975), Bagger 287 (1976), and Bagger 293 (1995).
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