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Bagger 288
Krupp finished this bucket-wheel excavator in 1978, and at about 13,500 metric tons, 96 meters tall and 220 meters long it is the machine most people picture when they hear "world's biggest vehicle." Its wheel carries 18 buckets of 6.6 cubic meters each and can strip 240,000 cubic meters of earth a day, yet it takes only a handful of people to run it.
Its best story is the 2001 move from the Hambach mine to Garzweiler, crawling at a few meters a minute across roads, a railway and the river Erft. For the outright weight record, look to its younger sibling Bagger 293, which Guinness lists at 14,196 metric tons.
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Overburden Conveyor Bridge F60
At 502 meters long, the F60 overburden conveyor bridge is the giant you can actually walk on. It stands about 80 meters high and takes its name from its 60-meter cutting height, the depth of soil it could strip away above the lignite seams. It worked only from March 1991 to June 1992 before its mine closed, and it now stands at a visitor mine near Lichterfeld in eastern Germany.
The walk across it takes about 90 minutes and climbs to a viewing point 74 meters above the ground. After dark, light and sound installations turn the steelwork into a night show.
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Big Muskie
Retired: only its bucket survives
Bucyrus-Erie's 4250-W was the largest walking dragline ever built, swinging a 220-cubic-yard bucket at a coal mine in southeastern Ohio. Between 1969 and 1991 it moved more than 483 million tons of rock and earth, and the whole machine weighed about 13,500 tons. It was dismantled in 1999.
What remains of the machine in the picture is that bucket, now the centerpiece of Miners' Memorial Park near McConnelsville. Standing beside it is the best way left to grasp the scale of the walking giant it once hung from.
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Big Brutus
The largest electric shovel still in existence is a 16-story Bucyrus-Erie 1850-B in West Mineral, Kansas. Put to work in 1963, it ran around the clock for 11 years until mining there ended in 1974. At over 11 million pounds it was too expensive to dismantle, so the mining company donated it and it was dedicated as a museum in 1985.
It is one of the few giants here you can climb: visitors can go up to a perch on top of the shovel and look out over the old strip pits. It has been on the National Register of Historic Places since 2018.
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Crawler-transporter
NASA's two crawler-transporters were built in 1965 to carry Saturn V rockets, and they still do the same job, moving the Space Launch System rocket and Orion spacecraft to Launch Pad 39B at Kennedy Space Center. Crawler-Transporter 2, upgraded to lift 18 million pounds, was named the heaviest self-powered vehicle by Guinness World Records in 2023, at about 6.65 million pounds.
Patience is part of the deal: it creeps along at about 1 mph loaded, so the roughly 4.2-mile trip to the pad takes eight to 12 hours.
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Liebherr LR 13000
The construction giant of the group, Liebherr's LR 13000 is rated by its maker as the most powerful conventional crawler crane in the world, lifting up to 3,000 metric tons at a 12-meter radius and hoisting to a maximum height of 236 meters.
The clever part is how it travels: for all that strength, no single component weighs more than 70 metric tons, so the crane can be broken down and shipped around the world at reasonable cost before being assembled on site.
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Liebherr R 9800
R 9800 G6
Hydraulic excavators are the machines that actually fill the giant trucks further down this list, and Liebherr's R 9800 is one of the very biggest in the class. The current G6 weighs 800 metric tons as a backhoe or 810 as a face shovel, with a 47.5-cubic-meter backhoe bucket and two engines rated together at 2,984 kW.
For sheer weight, Caterpillar's 6090 FS goes further still. The R 9800 is the one you will find on Liebherr's current mining range.
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Caterpillar 6090 FS
The heavyweight of the hydraulic shovels here, Caterpillar's 6090 FS is listed at about 1,000 metric tons in face shovel form, some 190 more than the R 9800. Its heaped bucket holds 52 cubic meters and carries about 93.6 metric tons a pass, driven by two Cummins QSK60 diesels with 4,500 hp between them.
The machine has a long family tree: it started out as the O&K RH400 in 1997, became the Terex and then the Bucyrus RH400 as the mining business changed hands, and took the Cat name after Caterpillar bought Bucyrus.
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BelAZ 75710
The Belarusian BelAZ 75710 has the biggest rated payload of any haul truck: 450 metric tons, about 87 more than the Caterpillar, Liebherr and Komatsu trucks that follow. Two MTU 16-cylinder diesels of about 2,300 hp each power it, and the truck alone weighs around 360 metric tons, measuring 20 meters long, 9.7 meters wide and 8.2 meters tall.
Its famous 503.5-ton load, set in 2014 and recognized by Guinness, was carried on a test ground, so read it as a demonstration of strength rather than an everyday payload.
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Caterpillar 797
797F
Caterpillar's flagship truck hauls a nominal 363 metric tons (400 short tons) a load behind a single 20-cylinder Cat C175-20 diesel rated at 4,000 gross horsepower. Where the BelAZ splits the work between two engines, the 797F does it with one, and it still reaches 39.5 mph loaded on its 59/80R63 tires.
Fully loaded, it weighs about 624 metric tons. The F generation raised the payload by 20 short tons over the 797B it replaced, putting it level with the Liebherr and Komatsu rivals that follow.
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Liebherr T 282 series
T 284
The successor to Liebherr's popular T 282 C sits in the same 363-metric-ton payload class as the Caterpillar but takes a different route to it, with Liebherr's own Litronic Plus AC electric drive. It weighs 242 metric tons empty and 605 fully loaded, with 2,720 kW of gross power.
That empty weight is the figure to notice: on every trip the T 284 carries half again its own weight in rock.
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Komatsu 980E-5SE
Komatsu's entry in the 400-short-ton (363-metric-ton) class is the electric-drive 980E-5SE, and its headline is power: a 16-cylinder Komatsu SDA16V190-1 engine rated at 4,400 gross horsepower, more than the 4,000 Caterpillar quotes for the 797F. Komatsu puts that extra muscle toward higher speed on grade, which matters on the long climbs out of a deep pit.
Fully loaded, it weighs about 635 metric tons, putting it squarely alongside the Caterpillar and Liebherr trucks as the third of the big three.
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Terex 33-19 "Titan"
Retired: on display in Sparwood, British Columbia
When it was launched in 1974, the Terex 33-19 Titan was the largest dump truck ever built, designed to carry 350 tons. It measures over 67 feet long and 26 feet wide with a gross weight of 1,209,500 pounds, and it remained a one-off prototype that spent its working life in mines in California and British Columbia until it was retired around 1990.
Today it stands restored, minus its engine, as a roadside attraction off Highway 3 in Sparwood, where you can walk right up to the tires.
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LeTourneau L-2350
Now sold as the Komatsu WE2350
The world's largest wheel loader began life at LeTourneau, passed to Joy Global and is now built by Komatsu, which designed it to center-load ultra-class trucks of 400 tons and more. Its standard bucket holds 40.5 cubic meters and lifts about 72.6 metric tons per pass.
Operating weight is about 266 metric tons, with 2,300 hp feeding an electric hybrid drive that Komatsu says can use up to 45% less fuel than mechanical-drive loaders of similar size.
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Komatsu D575A
D575A-3 SD Super Dozer
Komatsu's D575A has been called the largest operational crawler tractor in the world, and the Super Dozer version makes the case with a blade that holds 69 cubic meters (90 cubic yards). Ready to work, it weighs about 152,600 kg, the lightest machine here and still a heavyweight.
Komatsu field-tested the first D575A-2 from 1989 to 1991, and the Super Dozer followed in 1996, with the first one going to work at a West Virginia coal mine. It was built specifically for mining and quarry work rather than ordinary construction sites.
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