Hey guys after work yesterday I had some time to go take some pictures of Inland's CN pit just outside of Winnipeg. From what I understand its currently being dismantled albeit very very slowly as is they're way. lol After the pit had been mined by conventional method using loaders and probably mobile crushing, screening, and washing equipment, they built an interesting dredge machine that I think is electrically driven and uses two clamshell buckets that dig down to something like eighty feet deep, the sand and gravel is then dumped into hoppers and conveyed to a stationary crushing, screening, and washing plant. From what I understand this pit and all it's equipment is either being moved to they're new dredging operation at the Pine Ridge pit or probably going up for sale or being scrapped. If anybody is more familiar with this operation feel free to weigh in. Most of my info is from stories and rumours. lol
Ok back to uploading pics. My computer was doing something weird. I didn't have to many places I could climb up to safely take pictures of the dredge itself but you should be able to see the two clamshells themselves they're pretty big. The new dredge at the Pine Ridge pit has one single clamshell that is apparently 16 cubic yard capacity for Manitoba this is a pretty big operation.
Next is the conveyors and I tried taking a picture to show how long the pit itself is, it actually crosses one of the municipal roads in the area so it must be close to a mile long. The water sure is pretty being all blue and since they're not running any equipment in the pond anymore.
A lot of the conveyors have been dismantled and some look more like they're just rusting away so like I said they're taking they're time. I imagine once the provincial government hires somebody to do the reclamation developers will build some mighty expensive houses along the pond. We really need a section dedicated to gravel and aggregate mining I'd love to see pictures of how its mined in bigger centers like in the U.S. or even down in eastern Canada like Toronto.
interesting pics.
That's a pretty interesting operation, thanks for posting those for us to see.
Yup no problem I'll probably try and take more when the opportunity comes up. Inland spent something like 29 million dollars on they're new operation but they run it much like a government agency, the dredge hardly runs and you seldom see any material coming off the belts, but yet you see Inland trucks driving up and down Garven road and HeatherDale Rd. all the time. We've had an early spring here so the company I work for as small and retarded as it is, has take advantage of the good weather and we've been screening probably since mid-March. We only shut down screening for about a month and a half this winter due to the cold and sand sticking to the screens. But once it warmed up we started going. Last week they started up the little wash plant we have, and if the ice melted off the slackline cables they might be dredging as early as this week too. I'll try to get pictures of that too if I have time.
thansk for sharing, learning something new everyday. i thought inco in thompson was the only one that used dredges. thansk KoO Published Author
That's quite an operation. Do both those Clams work at the same time?
From what I've heard when one is going down the other is coming up. The new dredge at the other pit only has one 16 cubic yard clam. Somebody once told me they had an underwater slide that trapped one of the old clams at the CN pit so they dug it out with the other. So I wonder what they would do if that single clam at the PineRidge pit would get trapped. lol