Once in a while we have a really nice day in January. January 29, 2011, was such a day. Beautiful sunshine, temperatures in the seventies and no wind. Nice day for on outing in the show cars. Since the '38 is out of commission right now, we went to the back-up, my Mustang convertible.
The Endless Memories Car Club of Grove,Oklahoma, had called to make arrangements with the Rebels to meet and take a drive to West Mineral, Kansas, to find BIG BRUTUS. We found it. Hard to miss something on the Kansas prairie that stands one-hundred-sixty feet tall and weighs eleven million pounds.
BIG BRUTUS was used in the strip-pit mining of coal in the area. It never dug coal. It removed the "overburden" or soil and rock from the coal. The bucket could remove ninety cubic yards or one-hundred-thirty-five to one-hundred-fifty tons in one bite. That is enough to fill three railroad cars.
BIG BRUTUS operated between the years of 1963 to 1982 owned by the Pittsburg and Midway Coal Mining Company (P & M). It is now a museum and memorial to coal mining, donated by
P & M in 1984.
It was totally electric. Two 3,500 HP synchronous AC motors ran the thirteen DC generators. Each generator was responsible for controlling one of the thirteen motors.
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