The world’s largest land vehicle is a huge excavator that’s taller than the Statue of Liberty and heavier than the Eiffel Tower.
Bagger 288, built by the German company Krupp for the energy and mining firm Rheinbraun, is a bucket-wheel excavator or mobile strip mining machine.
When its construction was completed in 1978, Bagger 288 superseded Big Muskie as the largest land vehicle in the world, at 13,500 tons and over 300 feet tall.
It took five years to design and manufacture and five years to assemble, with the total cost reaching $100 million (£80 million)
The Bagger 288 was 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 metres of overburden daily – the equivalent of a football field dug to 30 metres deep.
The coal produced in one day fills 2400 coal wagons. The excavator is up to 220 metres long and approximately 96 metres 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.
Over 8,500 square feet of tread carry the Bagger’s 13,000 tons of weight at a stately 0.4 miles per hour. The Bagger 288 is so large that it has its own on-board toilets and kitchenettes.
It only requires a team of five to operate the machine, a much smaller number than other machines of its scale. The bucket-wheel is the height of a seven-story building and each of its 18 buckets are 7,700 pounds empty.
Almost 90,000 pounds of paint cover the structure, which includes two pylons – each 148 feet tall – and 7,218 feet of steel suspension cables.
The Bagger 288 is one of a group of similar sized and built vehicles, such as Bagger 281 (built in 1958), Bagger 285 (1975), Bagger 287 (1976), and Bagger 293 (1995).