This machine is much younger than most in this topic, hailing back from the late 80's. No doubt it has seen its fair share of hard work in one of the harshest environments on earth. Used for its entire life in hard rock, this RH200 has worked in an Iron Ore mine in the Pilbara area of Western Australia where it now sits as a display.
very cool pics of a real nice machine
Lots of them still working to. Great diggers. I've made a few dollars out of them over the years
looking at the handrails and fire suppression it looks as though it's only just been parked up Is that the one across from the MEM @ TP or another?
Yes it is the one parked up across from MEM @ TP. Hadn't been parked there long in 2010 when I took the photos. Still a few of them working hard in mines around the place.
Awesome machines. You can tell this is a bit newer of a machine from the early 90s by the enclosed deck sides. The originals from the late 80s had open platforms along the outsides of the engine compartments. The newer machines had the enclosures like this one did.
Alco, spot on, it arrived in Tom Price in 96, it was affectionally known as shovel 6, we also had another RH200 known as shovel 5, just before it was walked to it's final position it was parked up in area so that the steam cleaners could get to her, in the mean time one of the lube trucks went and fully serviced it! Not knowing it was getting parked up, so they had to drain 10 thousand liters out of the tanks once she was parked up, which I thought was quite funny. I blocked off the light vehicle road at the other end when she was parked where it is sitting. All the older shovel ops loved the 200 and all said that it would outdig a hitachi 5500 that we had. She was well worn out by the time she was parked up, and spent the last few years of her life sitting on a low grade stockpile so she didn't have to walk to far.
Here's a pic of an older machine that Alco has described.
Here's a couple of pics of 2 RH200's that are being relocated to another mine here. We just walked them 23 km's from mine to the port, then disassembled so they can be loaded onto barge and floated to other mine. Both machines had been parked up for 2 years. Apart from a few electrical issues they fired up and made the journey without any major dramas.
This is pretty neat. If this is the Tom Price machine you mentioned, it was actually delivered in December 94 and is serial number 40035 as the other Tom Price 200 was number 40017 and delivered in Oct 91. What makes it interesting to me, is the newer machine is one serial number newer than the one we still run in a daily production role, with aroud 113,000 hours on the clock....and the older machine is two serial numbers newer than our original 200, that is still run occasionally by one of our contractors who bought if off of us years ago.
Wow! Powerful equipment!