The Biggest Land Based Vehicle: Bagger 293

Bagger 293, previously known as the MAN TAKRAF RB293, is a giant bucket-wheel excavator made by the German industrial company TAKRAF, formerly an East German Kombinat. It owns or shares some records for terrestrial vehicle size in the Guinness Book of Records. Bagger 293 was built in 1995, one of a group of similar sized 'sibling' vehicles such as the Bagger 281 (built in 1958), Bagger 285 (1975), Bagger 287 (1976), Bagger 288 (1978), Bagger 291 (1993), etc.

It is used in a brown coal mine near Hambach in Germany. It is called Bagger 293 by its current owner, RWE Power AG (the second-largest energy producer of Germany). It was called RB293 by its former owner, the brown coal company Rheinbraun
, which since 1932 was already a daughter company of RWE (but during an internal reshuffle in 2003 merged with another daughter company to form RWE Power AG).

This should give an idea about how huge this is..

Bagger 293 is 96 metres (314.9 feet) tall (highest terrestrial vehicle, size shared with Bagger 288). It is 225 metres (738.2 feet) long (same as Bagger 287), weighs 14,200 tons (31.3 million lb), and requires five people to operate. The bucket-wheel itself is over 21.3 metres (over 70 feet) in diameter with 20 buckets, each of which can hold over 15 cubic metres of material.

What it takes to move something this big

The size of the buckets

Weighing over 31 million pounds means you’re not going to get anywhere fast, and the Bagger 293 is no exception. It took over three weeks for the excavator to make the 80-mile journey from the factory to the Garzweiler mine it would first call home, traveling at the blistering pace of one kilometer per hour.

It can move 240,000 cubic metres (8.510 million cubic feet) of earth per day.To put that in perspective, that is the equivalent of being able to dig a hole the length of a football field over 80 feet deep.

 Satellite image of the Bagger 293 in Germany click here