Giant P&H shovel becomes a tourist attraction (Blog Re-Visited)

by Nick Drew | Thu 23 Jun 2016

Giant P&H shovel becomes a tourist attraction (Blog Re-Visited)

A couple of years ago it was a delight to receive some more photos from one of our friends “Down Under” and so I thought I would re-share a bit of Australian sunshine and heavy kit with you on the Digger Man Blog this week.

This massive, electrically driven 850 tonne P&H 2800, was first manufactured in 1976 by Japanese company Kobe Steel, who at the time were building these machines under licence for P&H. The giant shovel, which featured a 27 cubic metre dipper capacity, was originally delivered to Mount Newman Mining in Western Australia, where it continued to work until 1994.

The machine was sold to Premier Coal in the September of 1994 and incredibly at around 20 years old the machines second life began. An engineering team from Premier Coal assisted with the dismantling of the shovel at the Mount Newman mine, prior to relocation and re-building at its new work site at the strangely named Western Number 5B mine, which is nowadays known as Lake Kepwari.

Following its rebuild, the machine commenced operating at Western Number 5B mine in 1995, but just a year later the machine was on the move again. This time the machine was tracked under its own steam to the Premier Coal mine some 10 kilometres away.

The machine worked at the Premier Coal mine for the following 14 years before it was finally decommissioned and relocated to its current place of rest in 2010. This old machine had an operating life of 34 years and its estimated that it shifted in excess of 200 million tonnes of material.

At the end of its incredible working life a decision was made to preserve this machine as a tourist attraction, as is often done with mining kit in Australia, Canada and America. The local “Collie” Rotary Club volunteered to restore the much loved No6 shovel, which was its fleet number in the mine. The team worked hard to clean, prepare and paint it in an attempt to get it looking in pristine condition again.

Many local businesses assisted and supported the restoration, supplying a whole host of products and services including cleaning materials, paint, scaffolding, and with the construction of an access road from the main highway for potential “big kit” tourists to get to the machine.

In their heyday, Mount Newman Mining (now BHP iron ore ) had 20 x P&H electric rope shovels working – 8 x 1900’s + 8 x 2100’s and 4 x 2800’s, of which 2 found their way south to Collie (Premier Coal) including the one featured in this post. Our contact worked for Esco back in those days, and tells us that he used to despatch around 200 bucket teeth per month into this mine! I for one think it’s great that machines from our earthmoving heritage are saved for future generations to see, enjoy and to reflect on how we used to move vast quantities of earth. Thanks to our friend down under for sharing these shots with the Digger Man Blog.

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