The Largest Walking Dragline Ever Made - Big Muskie!
By: The Working Man
Can you imagine a machine that is taller than a 20 story
building and as wide as an eight lane highway? Well
the largest walking dragline ever made, Big Muskie, is just
that huge.
Built by Bucyrus Erie in 1966, Big Muskie is the largest
walking dragline ever built. Big Muskie worked from 1969 to
1991 at the Central Ohio Coal Company's Muskingum Mine
near Zanesville Ohio, where it removed overburden from
the coal seam.
As far as the heaviest mobile land machine in world history,
only The Captain is heavier. Big Muskie clocks in second
tipping the scales at a massive 27 million pounds.
Big Muskie is a much larger version of the Bucyrus Erie
4250 series of draglines. It took 3 years to build the
immense dragline at a 1966 cost of $25 million, or a little
less than 1 dollar a pound.
The largest dragline in the world took 300 rail cars and
over 250 trucks to bring on the site. It is 222 feet high
and 151 feet wide and almost one tenth of a mile long!
The bucket on Big Muskie weighs 230 tons empty. It is
14 feet high, 27 feet wide and 23 feet deep. It can
hold 325 tons of dirt. The cables holding it are 5 inches
thick.
The main house on this dragline is 140 feet long, 120 feet
wide and 40 feet tall.
It took 13,800 volts of electricity to operate which
generated about 63,000 horsepower.
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