Something You'll Never See on the Beltway?

Photy by Fox Magrathea Circe

This is not a scene from the new Terminator movie. It's a Bucket Wheel Excavator, the largest vehicle in the world. Measuring 311 feet high and 705 feet long, the Bucket Wheel Excavator is larger than the machine used to move the space shuttle on the ground. It's a machine of superlatives, weighing 45,000 tons and costing $100 million. Bucket Wheel Excavators are used to dig holes in the earth: They can dig a football field sized hole to a depth of 25 meters in a single day. And it's a good thing they're not on the Beltway: Bucket Wheel Excavators maximum speed is .6 miles per hour.