f-60 Worlds LARGEST Conveyor

With a length of 1650 feet, a height of 290 feet and a width of 790 feet the F-60 conveyor bridge in Lichterfeld, Southern Brandenburg, Germany is the worlds largest mobile object.

It was built by the Man Takraf Company, Lauchhammer Germany. And it took one thousand workers three years to build it.

Earth is excavated at one end of the conveyor and conveyed up the bridges span to be deposited over half a kilometer away from the work area. The excavated earth moves along the conveyors at a speed of 36Kmh at the rate of 50,000 tons of excavated earth per hour.

The conveyor can excavate a staggering 130 million cubic metres of earth in a year.

Everything about this piece of engineering is vast, from the beam of the bridge to the size of the carriages that it moves along. These mammoth feats of engineering never cease to fascinate when one considers the amount of welding that was done to put it together along with the hundreds of thousands of bolts and washers that were used with precision in its assembly. And after all of the man hours to create it, it then has to work, and perfectly to complete the tasks ahead.

Thousands of gallons of grey paint were needed to protect it from the elements.

The picture below shows the main supporting carriage that holds up the other end of the bridge almost a third of a kilometer away from the main structure. The whole structure can move at half a mile per hour on these carriages.

There are 760 wheels on 380 axles that are individually powered. Or one could say that it was a 760 wheel drive !

The perspective and size of this machine is lost in these photos as the photographer had to stand a long way away to get a good shot, otherwise the viewer is just confronted with a mass of steel !

This 13,500 ton conveyor bridge is the last of its kind, it is no longer in operation and sits as a tourist attraction as opposed to being cut up for scrap. But in the years that it was employed , it earned its money with the colossal amount of aggregates that it shifted, somewhere in the region of 600 million cubic meters.

As this conveyor is now an exhibit, visitors to the site may negotiate the F60's gangways and ladders to reach a viewing platform that is 75 meters above ground. Not forgetting that the actual bridge conveyor itself is more than half a kilometer long. which makes it one of the world’s largest pieces of moveable, technical machinery displays.