Talk about Toys for Boys:
When a mining shovel named Silver Spade was built in South Milwaukee in the early 1960s, it took 250 railroad cars to send the behemoth to a coal field in Ohio.
Weighing 14 million pounds, Silver Spade was shipped in pieces. Its bucket could lift 300,000 pounds of dirt in a single scoop. Its boom stood 20 stories tall.
Silver Spade was built by Bucyrus International Inc., then called Bucyrus-Erie. It took about 38,000 engineering hours just to design the mining shovel at the company's South Milwaukee headquarters.
From 1965 until this spring, Silver Spade dug 607 million cubic yards of earth at Ohio strip mines. By comparison, the Panama Canal required 405 million cubic yards of excavation.
I'd post a picture, but it won't fit into Blogger.
Wow, that's a lot of steel. Thanks for that moment of perspective.
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