Bagger 293: Five People Guide a 14,200-ton Giant

Five people guide a 14,200-ton giant

Bagger 293 is the world's largest and heaviest land vehicle. TAKRAF built it as a bucket-wheel excavator, a machine with a spinning wheel of scoops.

It works in the Hambach lignite mine in North Rhine-Westphalia, Germany.

It stands 315 feet (96 meters) tall. Guinness World Records lists Bagger 293 at 310 feet (94.5 meters), while other sources give 315 feet (96 meters). It shares the tallest-land-vehicle record with Bagger 288.

Five people operate it.

It crawls on 12 tracks at about 33 feet a minute. Its tracks leave marks no deeper than those made by a person walking through mud.

The wheel cuts into the earth and feeds it onward while the body moves slowly across the ground. The machine's enormous weight is spread across its tracks.

It can move up to 8.475 million cubic feet (240,000 cubic meters) of earth a day.

8.475 million cubic feet?

That is about 96 Olympic-sized swimming pools in one day.

Power comes from the external electric grid.

When the mine closes, no dismantling plan has been made public.

From the side it looks like a hill on tracks.
All of that mass answers to five people.

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