Biggest Scraper Gathering in Australia

We couldn’t really let this pass without giving it a mention on the Digger Man Blog. The largest fleet of motor scrapers put together in Australia, possibly even the world, has been working on the site of the new Sydney airport and an impressive machinery fleet photo has been doing the rounds on social media.

When you have somewhere in the region of 25 million cubic metres of earth to shift, you need a big fleet of kit, and on the new Sydney airport site they have no less than 250 items of earthmoving equipment, a tally which includes 78 motor scrapers!

The machines which are predictably all from the Caterpillar stable includes, 6 x 657G’s and incredibly 46 x 651E’s and 26 x 637G models.

Our old mate and Australian heavy machinery legend Gary Steen has been responsible for the day to day running and maintenance of the earthmoving fleet, talking about the job he said, “It's been the highlight of my career managing this fleet on this awesome project. Never to be seen again. I have the best plant team ever, keeping this gear running with top availability”.

Who can argue with that, some of us can only imagine what its like to work on such a massive and high-profile heavy equipment site like that, it must be an incredible sight and sound to witness all those machines in action on a daily basis!

Photo: Courtesy of Gary Steen.

During an open day event, these two little fellas had the opportunity to get up close and personal with a giant 657G.

We understand that they are now well over halfway through the mammoth earthmoving task, having moved record amounts of material in recent months, fantastic to see!

You can checkout some rather long distance motor scraper action from the sites public viewing area in this video from gjcc73 on You Tube.