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Dating to the 1930s, this silent 16mm film from Germany shows the surface mining of coal using large continuous bucket wheel dredges (:38) or Riesenschaufelradbagger (coal mining machines). At 2;20, the buckets are seen up close scraping the earth continuously off the side of the mine site. At 3:23 the raw material enters a series of conveyer belts where it is moved at high speed and then placed in a large heap at 4:30. At 9:29, ore cars loaded with coal are moved to a processing facility and converted at 10:40 into bricks or briquettes. Bucket wheel excavators are machines for mining raw materials and for use on large construction sites. Particularly large bucket wheel excavators - with dimensions of several hundred meters - are used in lignite mining. Bucket wheel excavators are among the largest and most spectacular excavators in the world and have been manufactured since the 1930s. Since 1978, there are excavators that can move daily up to 240,000 tons of coal or cubic meters of overburden . These 240,000er are the largest excavators in the world today. With their commissioning and a weight of more than 12,000 tons, they became the largest land vehicles in the world, ahead of the delivery platforms for the US moon rockets. Built in 1978 by VVB TAKRAF Lauchhammer excavator 1510 SRs6300 in the Lausitzer district and built in the same year by Krupp Industrietechnik bucket wheel excavator “288“ in the Rheinische Revier were the first excavators in this performance class. The excavator 288 is currently working in the Garzweiler open pit ( RWE Power ). The primary application of BWEs is in lignite (brown coal) mining, where they are used for soft rock overburden removal in the absence of blasting. They are useful in this capacity for their ability to continuously deliver large volumes of materials to processors, which is especially important given the continuous demand for lignite. Because of the great demand for lignite, lignite mining has also been one of the areas of greatest development for BWEs. The additions of automated systems and greater manoeuvrability, as well as components designed for the specific application, have increased the reliability and efficiency with which BWEs deliver materials. We encourage viewers to add comments and, especially, to provide additional information about our videos by adding a comment! See something interesting? Tell people what it is and what they can see by writing something for example: “01:00:12:00 — President Roosevelt is seen meeting with Winston Churchill at the Quebec Conference.“ This film is part of the Periscope Film LLC archive, one of the largest historic military, transportation, and aviation stock footage collections in the USA. Entirely film backed, this material is available for licensing in 24p HD, 2k and 4k. For more information visit
