A very long time ago

Yesterday Kadizzle was surfing youtube and bumped into the video below.  It is a half decent video of the Silver Spade.  Kadizzle started his career early in coal mining.  At one time is was the role of Kadizzle to do the safety training for about two thousand coal miners in Eastern Ohio with Consolidation Coal Company.  Consol at that time was the second largest coal company.  In Ohio Consol had both surface and underground mines.  The Silver Spade was the largest earth moving shovel ever built.  People would come from all over the world to see it.  If you look closely at the video you can get some idea of the size.  Look at the full sized bulldozer at the base of the machine.  The job of that dozer was just to clean up so the big machine could move.  At one time a chunk of rock larger than a house came loose on the highwall. To save the bulldozer operator from being crushed the operator of the shovel caught the boulder with the bucket of the shovel.  The weight was too much and the whole bucket was torn from the machine.  Kadizzle clearly remembers one day driving somewhere in the vast mine on a gravel road.  Coming down the road were a pair of crawlers.  The giant crawlers you see in the video were coming down the road by themselves, no shovel.  The crawlers were being driven by the electric motors inside them.  The crawlers were headed back to the repair shop.  A truck with a generator drove beside the crawlers to provide electricity.  These are the same crawlers that are used on the device that took the space shuttle out to launch. 

Kadizzle remembers his first visit on the machine.  To get onto the machine you had to go underneath the machine and walk up a couple flights of metal stairs.  Once up to the bottom of the main machine you got in an elevator.  The elevator went right up the center pin of the machine.  It was small.  You could get about three people in it.  To this very day Kadizzle can remember the trick his brain pulled on him when he got out of that elevator.  Since the shovel was working the entire shovel rotated around the elevator.  The brain tries to make sense out of reality.  Stepping off the elevator the brain said the elevator was rotating.  The brain could not conceive of such a large room we stepped into rotating, but that in reality was happening.  When you got off the elevator you were in a room about the size of a basketball court.  Once they had to move the machine across the interstate in Ohio.  To do this they piled dirt 24 feet deep and went across.  The machine had a very difficult time moving on anything but solid coal or rock.  To move across country the machine had to lay down matts in front after it picked them up from behind. 

It seems like so long ago when Kadizzle was working there.  He must have been about 23.   Life has zipped by and a lot has happened since.