Earth Movers II

Short answer: Bagger 293 is a bucket-wheel excavator built by TAKRAF of Leipzig, Germany. It went into service on July 7, 1995, at RWE's Hambach open-pit lignite (brown coal) mine near Cologne.

Guinness World Records lists it as the largest and heaviest land vehicle, meaning the biggest machine that moves under its own power. Guinness gives 14,196 tonnes, 220 m long and 94.5 m tall, while other sources give about 14,200 t, 225 m and 96 m. The 21.6 m wheel carries 18 buckets. As it turns, the buckets cut into the mine face and dump onto conveyor belts that carry the earth away. Guinness puts each bucket at 6,600 liters (6.6 m³), but other sources say about 15 m³. It can move 240,000 cubic meters of earth a day. That's a volume, not a weight: at typical soil densities it's well over 200,000 tonnes. It mostly digs overburden, the soil and rock above the coal. It runs on about 16.5 MW of outside electricity through a cable, crawls on 12 caterpillar tracks at a few meters a minute, and needs a crew of five.