Scale Model Mining

The Marion 5860 was not one shovel, but two.

And eventually, those two machines helped give birth to a third.

Let me explain.

The first Marion 5860 stripping shovel entered production in 1965 in Illinois. It carried an 80-cubic-yard dipper and used a boom measuring approximately 180 feet.

The machine weighed more than 10 million pounds, or roughly 5,000 tons.

A second unit was built the following year and also went to work in Illinois coalfields.

Sometime in the 1980s, the second 5860 was transferred to the Captain Mine, where The Captain also worked, and was converted into a bucket-wheel excavator, referenced as the 5872WX.

All of this data comes from Eric C. Orlemann’s book Giant Earth-Moving Equipment, published in 1995.

Start building a collection of books like this.

Because some of the best machine history you'll ever find is still buried on paper, not online.

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At Peabody’s River Queen Mine in western Kentucky, the name everyone remembers is: the Big Digger.

It was a Marion 5960 stripping shovel, erected in 1969 near Central City and Greenville, at a time when Muhlenberg County coal was still running hard.

River Queen had already used giant equipment before, including the Bucyrus-Erie 1650-B. But the Marion changed the scale.

With a 125 cubic-yard bucket and a 215-foot boom, the 5960 was built to peel away overburden in volumes that smaller shovels couldn’t touch.

Its working weight was listed at about 17,825,000 pounds, making it one of the largest stripping shovels ever put into coal service.

By 1978, the machine had reportedly moved 240 million cubic yards of earth.

That number gives a better picture than any photograph.

It wasn’t there to load coal into trucks.

Its job was to uncover the seams, one bite at a time, so the mine could keep feeding western Kentucky’s coal economy.

The Big Digger worked into the late 1980s, then was parked and eventually scrapped around 1990.

What remains is memory, pictures and a very Kentucky kind of machine legend.

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Photo: The Ray McClain Collection

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When you think of Marion’s legendary draglines, the 8750 instantly comes to mind.

But did you know Marion built something “bigger”? The 8950.

Unlike the 8750, which saw several units produced after its 1971 introduction, the 8950 was a one-off machine, put to work in October 1973, according to the brilliant Eric C. Orlemann.

The 8950 carried a 310-ft boom, weighed 14,600,000 pounds, and was fitted with a 150 cu-yd bucket, the largest ever used on any Marion dragline.

The manufacturer's largest walking dragline went to work at AMAX’s Ayrshire Mine in Indiana. It operated for about 20 years before being, I would assume, scrapped later in the 1990s, or possibly in the early 2000s.

Absolute beast.

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The Marion 8800 was a record-breaking dragline.

Introduced in 1961, the big machine went to work at Peabody's Homestead mine in Kentucky, stripping overburden to expose coal seams.

But what made the Marion 8800 so special was its bucket.

In 1961, no dragline had ever broken the 100-cubic-yard mark. The 8800 changed that, becoming the first to cross that line after its original 85-yard bucket was upgraded.

The Marion 8800 was a monster, weighing 6,300 tons and carrying a 275-ft boom.

But in the 1960s, records didn't hold for long. Less than five years after the Marion 8800 entered production, other units such as the 8900 were moving up to 145 cubic yards, crushing old milestones like they never meant anything.

Data from "Giant Earth-Moving Equipment" by Eric C. Orlemann.

Must read!

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The rebuild of the dragline at South Africa’s Optimum Colliery shows how far mining companies are willing to go to extend the life of ultra-heavy equipment.

Liberty Coal invested roughly US$31 million to recommission the Marion 8200 after years of inactivity, turning the project into one of the most significant dragline restoration efforts seen in the country’s coal sector in recent years.

Unlike standard mining equipment rebuilds, dragline work operates on another level entirely. Every major component becomes a large industrial project on its own. Structural steel sections, walking mechanisms, hoist systems, motors, electrical rooms, ropes and boom assemblies all require detailed inspection, repair or replacement before the machine can safely return to operation.

The rebuild reportedly included upgrades to electrical and control systems, extensive structural refurbishment and replacement of critical wear components throughout the machine. Recommissioning a dragline after a long shutdown also means retesting the entire walking and digging cycle under operational loads, something that can take months before the unit is cleared for production work.

For coal operators, the economics remain compelling.

A brand-new large dragline can cost up to $100 million dollars and involve years of lead time. Rebuilding an existing machine at a fraction of that cost allows operators to keep proven stripping capacity online while avoiding the financial shock of full replacement.

That reality explains why draglines built decades ago are still working today.

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Photo: Liberty Coal

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Marion Power Shovel and Bucyrus were not just competitors. They were two American factories chasing the same impossible question: how much earth could a machine move before the machine itself became part of mining folklore?

Bucyrus was the older name, born in Ohio in 1880 and moved to South Milwaukee in 1893. Marion followed in 1884 from Marion, Ohio. By the Panama Canal era, both were already fighting for prestige. Bucyrus supplied 77 of the steam shovels used on the canal, while Marion sent 24. After their later merger, that meant one corporate bloodline could claim 101 of the 102 canal shovels.

The rivalry became far bigger in coal. Bucyrus built machines like the 1850-B Big Brutus, the 160-ft Kansas landmark with a 90-cubic-yard bucket, built for Pittsburg & Midway Coal in the early 1960s.

Marion answered with machines that looked less like equipment and more like moving industrial buildings.

The peak was The Captain, Marion’s 6360 stripping shovel. Commissioned in Illinois in 1965, it carried a 180-cubic-yard dipper, weighed about 28 million lb and used a 215-ft boom. A single pass could load more material than many early mine contractors moved in an hour or two.

Bucyrus fired back with draglines and shovels that dominated open-cut coal, oil sands and copper work.

Big Muskie, of course. And later the 2570WS family, including Ursa Major at Black Thunder, pushed dragline scale into another league.

Marion had its own heavyweights with the 8200 and 8750 draglines as well.

What made the rivalry special wasn't just size. It was confidence. Each company truly believed the next record could be engineered, cast, hauled, assembled and sold to a mine willing to gamble on scale.

Then the strangest ending came. In 1997, Bucyrus bought Marion, ending more than a century of competition. In 2011, Caterpillar swallowed Bucyrus too.

The names faded, but not from mining memory. Marion and Bucyrus proved that American mining machinery once had its own arms race, measured in yards, tons, booms and nerve. Few rivalries left a louder footprint in the pit and history.

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