This is an account of abandoned machines that were used in the early 1900s, their demise and the end of an era.
Draglines were used as an excavating tool in many surface mining operations. Below is a more detailed diagram of how draglines worked. The dragline would throw the bucket out and “drag” it back towards the main body of the machine.
I grew up in northern Appalachia (map below) and in my youth my Dad would take me to the mines every once in a while, where two memories stand out: the first is the sheer size and scale of the two draglines operating there and the second is the size and scale of the one D9 Caterpillar dozer that dad’s friend let me operate once when I was 9 years old. It was a thrilling experience, but what I remember most though is how funny and personable the strip-mining coal workers were. One even offered to take my mom out in one of his trucks (when she was two weeks past her due date) over some of the rough mining roads to get labor going. My mom would tell this story laughing.
What is left of the Virginia Mining Company coal tipple where my dad worked is just a field. Remnants of that time however are still lying around and rusting away in farming fields throughout the region where I grew up west of Wheeling West Virginia. The company Bucyrus-Erie built many of these models of walking draglines, but the two that Virginia Mining owned were either the Bucyrus Erie (BE) 1150-B or the 1250-B. They were just like Angeline though, the abandoned 1250-B shown below. This dragline was named after the wife of the owner of Starvaggi Coal Mining Company, which operated in Pennsylvania:
This Bucyrus Erie 1150B above is like one of the draglines I saw as a kid hanging out with my dad. This one in Pennsylvania remains nameless. It was likely built in 1944 and was the first walking “super dragline”. It was an upgrade of the previous Bucyrus-Erie 950-B and before that the 400-W walking dragline (below). The power source for all the draglines was a simple 4” cable lying across the ground connected to its undercarriage. This cable linked to a series of electric motors which produced up to 3175 HP.
By 1961 the next generation of draglines at Bucyrus Erie, the 1250-W, was developed. There is a YouTube documentary about one of the draglines called “The Anthracite King”. This model of dragline produced 5200 HP and is shown throughout the documentary in all its detailed glory, along with its author’s personal commentary. A still image of this now dilapidated B-E1250-W is below:
What I truly recall from my childhood is the white and red color scheme, typically Bucyrus Erie. Other companies, like the Marion 7400, used the same color scheme (below). The Bucyrus Erie models I am referring to with this color scheme though were built in the 1940’s and were used consistently up and through the 1970’s and beyond.
The dragline bucket size was always significant. The bucket size of the Virginia Mining 1250’s was 9 cubic yards. I know my Dad would talk about the big mining companies having much larger 30 CY to 65 CY buckets and thinking about how a person could live in one that size. These larger buckets though seemed to be attached not to draglines but to shovels, like Hannah Coal’s Mountaineer and the GEM of Egypt (Giant Earth Machine of Egypt Valley Ohio), both of which have now been scrapped.
These larger power shovels crawled on traditional caterpillar tracks. Below are several photos of the 65 cubic yard bucket that at one time was attached to the Mountaineer power shovel. It was owned at that time by the Hanna Coal Company of Ohio:
Below is a photo of the Mountaineer followed by one of the GEM of Egypt, the “anti-draglines”:
One memorable “crawl” of power shovels was when the Mountaineer had to cross Interstate 70 at midnight, twenty miles west of Wheeling, West Virginia. Significant at the time, it was documented by the New York Times:
Below (left) is a more current photo of The Mountaineer waiting its fate. It had been painted over the years and I believe it has been scrapped since this photo was taken. Below (right) is its sister machine The Silver Spade, which has also been scrapped.
Speaking of scale, below is the biggest most powerful dragline of all time: “Big Muskie”. The dragline was so immense, its components needed to be shipped to Central Ohio Coal Company's site to be erected. 340 rail cars and 260 trucks were needed to ship all of its components. on site. Weighing in at over an impressive 27,000,000 pounds, it stood nearly 22 stories high and had a 220-cubic yard bucket the size of a 12-car garage.
Old draglines and shovels are not the only machines to be dilapidated. Recently most of the relatively new Airbus A380 3 level superjumbo airliners are also slowly being dismantled in graveyards all around the world.
Blog post written by David Tritt, Senior Architect.
