Bagger 1473
bucket-wheel excavator

Bagger 1473 (christened as The Blue Wonder) is a Type SRs 1500-series bucket-wheel excavator prototype left abandoned in a field in the municipality of Schipkau in Germany.
Technical data
The bucket wheel excavator had a power of 5555 kW during operation and was supplied with a 6 kV power cable.
Overall, the bucket wheel excavator is about 50 meters high and about 171.5 meters long. The six-section crawler undercarriage, with a maximum travel speed of 6 meters per minute, carries the total mass of 3850 tons.
With 10 buckets of 1.5 cubic meters each and 57 pours per minute (known as the pour rate), the excavator achieves a theoretical mining capacity of 5130 cubic meters per hour. The bucket wheel diameter is 12.5 meters and the cutting speed is 3.73 meters per second.
The design of the wheel boom, with a length of 67 meters, enables an excavation height of up to 35 meters and an excavation depth of up to 15 meters.
History
The excavator was used at the Tagebau Meuro mine from 1965 to 2002.
After it was withdrawn from service, the municipalities Senftenberg, Großräschen, and Schipkau decided on a joint action to preserve the opencast mining machine. Between 29 August to 15 September 2003, Bagger 1473 was moved approximately 8.5 kilometres (5.3 mi) from the Meuro mine to near the EuroSpeedway Lausitz, where it would serve as a monument to the area's former lignite mining.
“Bagger 1473” enters the record as bucket-wheel excavator. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Bagger, bucket-wheel and excavator can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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This entry incorporates text from “Bagger 1473” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.