The Bagger 288 is a bucket-wheel excavator or mobile strip mining equipment manufactured by Krupp in Germany for the Rheinbraun Energy and Mining Corporation for $100 million
Bagger 288 was the world’s largest land vehicle when it was completed in 1978, surpassing NASA’s Crawler-Transporter, which carried the Space Shuttle and the Apollo Saturn V launch vehicles
Source: NASA
Source: Freepik
Source: Freepik
This German mining equipment is one of the largest land vehicles in the world, standing taller than the Statue of Liberty and weighing more than the Eiffel Tower
A bucket-wheel excavator like this one is used to cut through an entire town on HBO’s Westworld
85 million cubic feet of soil can be moved each day by the Bagger 288 excavator, which has a rotating wheel of buckets and shovels
Source: By LotharHakelberg / wikicommons
The Bagger 288 was designed to remove overburden from the Tagebau Hambach coal mine in Germany before mining begins
Every day, it is able to dig the equivalent of a football field to a depth of 30 meters (98 feet) or 265,000 tons of brown coal, often called lignite, in one day
In order to operate the machine, four to five people are required
Graduated 288 building
Four conveyors collect overburden (soil and rock) or lignite from buckets and transport the material at a speed of over 11 km/h
Each of the belts is 105 feet wide, making it easy to transport a Smart car on them
The 13,000 ton dredger moves at a slow 04 mph using 8,600 square feet of tread
The excavator is powered by 5,600 feet of power lines, each of which is the diameter of a man’s arm
The structure has 88,000 pounds of paint and consists of two 148-foot-tall columns and 7,218 feet of steel suspension cables
The wheels at the height of the bucket are equal to a seven-story building at 71 feet
Its 18 buckets weigh 7,700 pounds each (empty!) and can scoop up 230 cubic feet of soil, enough to fill a truck
Four 840 kW motors power this massive wheeled excavator, with a total driving power of 3,360 kW
When the excavator drives over grass or soil, it leaves tracks no deeper than a human footprint
Bagger 288 travels at a speed of 10 meters per minute and takes at least three weeks to complete a journey of 22 kilometers
Bagger 288 is currently owned and operated by RWE AG, a major energy company, and is part of a fleet of vehicles built in 1958 of the same size
There are no other earthmoving machines that can move mountains like the RWE Bagger 288
Similar machines can be used to move mountains in Russia, Montana, Romania to find gold
Canadian business Rosia Montana Gold intends to use Bagger 288 to help achieve this goal
Source: Ghost Rider: Spirit of Vengeance Movie
Bagger 288 appeared in the movie Ghost Rider: Spirit of Vengeance, released in 2012
The hero in the film used Bagger 288 as a form of threat to his opponents