Excavator Bagger 288: Facts about one of the largest land vehicles on Earth

One of the largest land vehicles that can be found on earth is Bagger 288. This bucket-wheel excavator has the power and capacity to dig out an entire city by itself. According to Forbes, the Bagger 288 was built by Krupp of Germany. This excavator is now under the ownership of RWE AG, a large utility company. 

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Bager 288 facts

The excavator is surely one of the largest land vehicles on earth at the moment and boasts of some interesting features. There are four conveyor belts in the vehicle that received the soil or the rocks from the buckets. The materials received are then carried at a speed of 11 mph by the vehicle. The individual belts are 10.5 feet wide. Such is the width that they can easily carry a smart car. One of the most interesting bager 288 facts is that its 13000 tons of weight can be easily carried by 8600 square feet of the tread.

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The electricity to this giant vehicle is fed by 5600 feet of electrical cables. This is equal to the electricity consumption of a city with 20000 people. The vehicle has been painted with 88000 pounds of paint. The machine consists of two pylons of 148 feet each and 7218 feet of steel suspension cables.

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The height of the bucket wheel of the vehicle is 71 feet. This is about the height of a seven-story building. The 18 buckets of the vehicle are 7700 pounds when empty and can move 230 cubic feet of soil at one time. The vehicle took five years for designing and manufacturing. And it took another five years to assemble the vehicle. The cost of the vehicle was $100 million.

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The vehicle surpassed Apollo spacecraft and NASA’s Crawler Transporter that is used to move the space shuttle as the largest vehicle presently found in the world. For operating this huge vehicle, five people are needed. This is not surprising as the bucket wheel has a seventy-foot diameter. Hence one needs more people to steer it properly.

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Sites, where the vehicle has been used, have moved the vehicle on caterpillar treads as that was less expensive than assembling and reassembling the entire machine. This vehicle was designed to be used in the open-pit coal mines in Germany. Despite the huge size and strength of the vehicle, the life span of the vehicle is however not very long.