Big Muskie

Big Muskie was a coal mining Bucyrus-Erie dragline owned by the Central Ohio Coal Company (formerly a division of American Electric Power), weighing 12700 tonnes and standing nearly 22 stories tall. It operated in the U.S. state of Ohio from 1969 to 1991.

Design specifications and service

The Big Muskie was a model 4250-W Bucyrus-Erie dragline (the only one ever built). With a 220-cubic-yard (170 m³) bucket, it was the largest single-bucket digging machine ever created and one of the world's largest mobile earth-moving machines alongside the Illinois-based Marion 6360 stripping shovel called The Captain and the German bucket wheel excavators of the Bagger 288 and Bagger 293 family. It cost $25 million in 1969, the equivalent of $161 million today adjusted for inflation. Its bucket could hold two Greyhound buses side by side. It took over 200,000 man hours to construct over a period of about two years.

Big Muskie was powered by electricity supplied at 13,800 volts via a trailing cable, which had its own transporter/coiling units to move it. The electricity powered the main drives, eighteen 1,000 horsepower (750 kW) and ten 625 horsepower (466 kW) DC electric motors. Some systems in Big Muskie were electro-hydraulic, but the main drives were all electric. While working, Big Muskie used the equivalent of the power for 27,500 homes, costing tens of thousands of dollars an hour just in power costs and necessitating special agreements with local Ohio power companies to accommodate the extra load. The machine had a crew of 5, and worked around the clock, with special emphasis on night work since the per kilowatt-hour rate was much cheaper.