SFO Day 5, Headed Home 5-3-09

Sunday, time to pack up and start going towards home. We took the long way home. I had heard about a place in Kansas that has the second largest electric coal shovel ever built on display. The shovel is named Big Brutus. It seemed like a place I'd want to see.
We traveled west into Oklahoma, then north towards Kansas. In Oklahoma we went through the small town of Picher. There were HUGE sand piles on each side of the road. It looked like a ghost town. There was a billboard on the side of the road that looked like it was something an Elementary school art class did. It said something about lead, and showed hands being washed. After I got home I Googled the town name and found out they have a huge lead problem. We continued north into Kansas.
It seemed to take forever to get to West Mineral, home of Big Brutus. I paid the small museum admission fee and looked around. HOLY CRAP!!! it's HUGE!!! the pictures don't really show it. Big Brutus is a Bucyrus-Erie model 1850B electric shovel. It's 160 feet tall and weighs 11 million pounds! It's the second largest electric shovel in the world.

To really get and Idea how big it is.... the people you see in the photo below are average sized adults. I zoomed in to get that picture.

Click on the pictures to see them full size!



You can walk through Big Brutus. They have it set up as a self guided tour. They give you a sheet of paper with numbers and info on it. It corresponds to numbered features inside and around the shovel. All the electric motors had been removed from inside, but the pictures are still cool.




I walked into the operators cab. The bucket is 90 cubic yards! A heaped bucket full of coal would weigh 150 tons. enough to fill 3 rail cars.


After we left Big Brutus, we went through Kansas City and up I-35. We stopped for the night at the Family Budget Inn Motel in Bethany, MO.