I got to see something you don’t find everyday while traveling north of Beulah the other day. A very large piece of equipment was making a slow, steady journey from one part of the Coteau mine to the other…what made it interesting was that it had to cross the highway. How does something so big, with enormous metal tracks, pull that off?

The first neat thing you should know is that this baby’s electric. Yes, that’s right…no engine. See that trailer being pulled behind it by the road grader? That’s a generator, a very large one at that…it’s kicking out enough DC current to drive that behemoth.

Now that’s a big extension cord! The operator of the grader gets to pull the generator just fast enough to keep up with the guy in front of him and maintain slack in the cable. Once they reach their destination at the other part of the mine, they’ll plug into a cable running back to the power plant. In the case of a “mine mouth” power plant such as this one, where the mine is located adjacent to the mine from which its coal is supplied, the power plant itself drives the diggers. That goes for those big draglines that you see from the highway as well as a smaller (yet still huge) digger like this one.

The section of road they cross is made of concrete, not asphalt; otherwise it wouldn’t survive something like this. Even so, they have big rubber mats that they pull across the road using a little skidsteer loader. I call it little because it isn’t even as tall as the track on that thing. See it down there in the foreground?

Anyway, they have a couple of trucks hold highway traffic from either direction, inch this thing across the road, and pull the mats back over to the side until they’re needed again. The whole process takes several minutes…a machine that large still moves very slowly.

I would have loved to have seen them take the big dragline crane across Highway 83 when they did that a while back…those don’t have tracks, they have giant feet that “walk” from one place to the next. Oh, and the cord is a lot bigger, too! They have a tractor dedicated just to tugging that cord around behind the dragline as it moves. Someday I’ll get pictures of that, too.