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Description
Photo from my second visit to the wastelands.

Bagger 262 at the opencast mine Garzweiler. These are among the oldest of the Baggers, built in 1966, seen here digging away at the topsoil. They eat their way through the landscape, making way for their colleagues on lower levels, who are digging out the actual lignite. The one you see here could also be spotted in my previous deviation:

I really wish this shot would convey how absolutely massive these are, but it doesn't. I'd say something like "Can you see the stairs, between the outer pairs of the tracks? Yeah, that's how tiny people would look next to this!". But to be honest, looking at photos like this one or this one here does it more justice.

Such a Bagger, or bucket wheel excavator, is made up of two parts. The main one contains the rotating superstructure with the bucket wheel itself, which can be rotated, moved up and down, turned from side to side and so on. When digging, they usually rotate back and forth in 90° angles, extending the arm further and further, the more soil they dig away. If they can't reach it any more, the mighty undercarriage with its twelve caterpillars can move at a maximum of ten meters per minute.

Connected to the main structure is the loading structure, which feeds the excavated material onto a conveyor belt. There's a huge network of those, either transporting the lignite to the powerplants, or the unusable soil to the Absetzer. Those are very similar to the excavators, but their job is the opposite:

Refilling the hole.

And you probably all know the much bigger brother, the Bagger 288, made famous on the internet thanks to this song. If you want to refer to that as song...

Description
Photo from my second visit to the wastelands.

Bagger 262 at the opencast mine Garzweiler. These are among the oldest of the Baggers, built in 1966, seen here digging away at the topsoil. They eat their way through the landscape, making way for their colleagues on lower levels, who are digging out the actual lignite. The one you see here could also be spotted in my previous deviation:

I really wish this shot would convey how absolutely massive these are, but it doesn't. I'd say something like "Can you see the stairs, between the outer pairs of the tracks? Yeah, that's how tiny people would look next to this!". But to be honest, looking at photos like this one or this one here does it more justice.

Such a Bagger, or bucket wheel excavator, is made up of two parts. The main one contains the rotating superstructure with the bucket wheel itself, which can be rotated, moved up and down, turned from side to side and so on. When digging, they usually rotate back and forth in 90° angles, extending the arm further and further, the more soil they dig away. If they can't reach it any more, the mighty undercarriage with its twelve caterpillars can move at a maximum of ten meters per minute.

Connected to the main structure is the loading structure, which feeds the excavated material onto a conveyor belt. There's a huge network of those, either transporting the lignite to the powerplants, or the unusable soil to the Absetzer. Those are very similar to the excavators, but their job is the opposite:

Refilling the hole.

And you probably all know the much bigger brother, the Bagger 288, made famous on the internet thanks to this song. If you want to refer to that as song...