Continuing this week’s theme of mining, today we’re visiting Germany’s lignite mining area to find some of the largest land vehicles on Earth!

Lignite (or “brown coal”) is found in 3 nearby open cast mines in the Rhineland; Hambach, Bergheim and Garzweiler. Collectively they extract over 100 million tons of lignite every year. Extracting such massive amounts of coal requires massive machines — hence the development of these descriptively named “Bucket-Wheel Excavators“.

Their operation is simple; a large rotating wheel has numerous buckets around the rim – which scoop up the lignite (or soil), and then drop it onto a conveyer belt which runs along to the centre of the machine. A typical Bucket-Wheel Excavator could extract the area of a football field, 30m deep, in a single day’s work.

Although the current World record for “largest land vehicle” is held by the RB293 bucket wheel excavator, the former title holder’s story is much more interesting.

The story goes that Bagger 288 was the reigning champ in the large vehicle stakes, and operated at the most southerly Mine, Hambach. Here Bagger 288 worked away, happily removing the soil which covered the lignite, until 2001 when it had exposed all the coal and was to be re-located to the Garzweiler mine to the North.

However, rather than dismantling the $100 million machine and moving it in pieces, it was deemed cheaper to just drive the 200m long, 100m tall vehicle, 22 kilometres up the road to its new home!

Unfortunately that route happened to cross Autobahn 61, the River Erft, a railroad line and several roads… The whole process cost the equivalent of $10 million and took three weeks! This absolutely incredible photo taken during the operation gives you pretty good idea of Bagger 288’s scale.

More pictures here and here. Wikipedia links for Bucket-Wheel Excavator & Bagger 288.

Thanks to Stefan, Graeme Wilkinson, Paul Burkitt-Gray, Chris, Darby & many other people!

This madman is walking down the middle of a motorway! Hmmm, on second thought… maybe he’s not in any danger. I wonder what he’s up to though?

Thanks: ledzepmet

The BBC’s Top Gear program recently took the Bugatti Veyron for a quick test drive — a very quick test drive¹. James May was asked to test the car’s top speed, and there was apparently only one place in the world it could be done — Volkswagen’s super-secret test facility in Germany, Ehra-Lessien.

Why? Because Ehra-Lessien has an unbroken straight 9 kilometres in length, which you can see running along the top of our thumbnails. It’s so long, that if you stood on one side of the straight, you wouldn’t be able to see the other end due to the curvature of the Earth. Seriously, this straight is enormous. One or two thumbnails just couldn’t do it justice, so we’ll do it in two parts. Here’s the northern end…

…and then we have to skip a couple of thumbnails before we get to the southern end!

There’s several cars visible on the straight, including one that seems to be going really very fast.

There’s also a small blob — which is either some kind of bug on the image, or a very strange new kind of concept-tractor.

Anyway, while May couldn’t get the Veyron up to its theoretical top speed, he did manage to equal the fastest speed of any production road car, reaching an almost incomprehensible 253 miles, or 407 kilometres per hour² on this very straight. You can watch the clip on Google Video to really get a feel for how fast that is.

Thanks to Top Gear.

The urban equivalent of Cow Tipping, the inner-city phenomenon of Car Tipping has begun to spread like wildfire across Germany now that its been spotted on Google Earth…

Also see our post on Extreme Parking for more.

Via Gearth Blog.

Well, unfortunately the world’s largest real paper planes aren’t usually kept outside, so today we’ll have to make do with sculptures of extremely large paper planes.

in Mukilteo, Washington, Dillion Works (who specialise in creating large 3D architectural elements), claim to have the world’s largest paper plane doubling as an awning over their front door (ground level shot).

Meanwhile in Germany, we find an equally huge, but slightly more adventurous paper plane, which has come to rest on the roof of Berlin’s Tegel airport.

So, does anybody know of any more huge paper planes lying around?

Thanks to me and Frank.