05 Britain’s Massive Miners 1

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Split into two parts, Britain’s Massive Miners Part 1 is devoted mainly to some of the large Komatsu and Hitachi hydraulic excavators working in Britain’s surface coal mines.

In Wales, we recorded a couple of 250-tonne PC 3000s, the Dash-6 currently being the biggest Komatsu excavator in Britain. They dwarf the Cat 777F dump trucks they are loading with overburden. Not far away a Demag H185S also loads overburden.

The biggest Hitachi excavators at work in the UK are the EX 1900s. Recorded in Wales, they each weigh 190 tonnes.

Among the face shovels and backhoes at work in Northumberland are the O&K RH 120-Cs, still going strong after twenty years. Some of them feature industry leading noise and dust suppression technology. These popular workhorses are joined by the very first Cat-powered Terex O&K 120-Es in Britain.

Britain’s surface pits continue to extract substantial quantities of coal from sites previously worked underground. How this is achieved with dedicated machinery is the theme of this absorbing programme.

This 79-minute programme is number five in the Massive Machines series of DVDs.

Researched and scripted by Steven Vale, this programme was filmed by Roger Wiltshire and directed by Jonathan Theobald. Narrated by David Holt, it was produced by Old Pond Publishing in 2009.