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 [...]

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