Anyone who has ever wielded a shovel knows what excavators can do. Such dancing elephants as the Komatsu PC 290 NLC, which shut down Munich Central Station on Thursday. The machine is actually supposed to combine enormous power with sensitive control. But the approximately ten meter long cantilever arm can tear a railway overhead line like a spider’s web. It’s tight enough in the swarm of tracks west of the sack station. During ongoing operations, a second S-Bahn route has to be fitted there with almost surgical precision. A concentration task for the excavator driver, who only operates the 30-ton truck with a small joystick and a few pedals. In principle, this doesn’t work much differently than with a working elephant, which is controlled with legs, a stick and shouts. However, elephants are intelligent, while the excavator is ultimately unforgiving of mistakes. The main thing is that the device removes something, for example gravel from the Munich gravel plain. The hydraulically operated digging shovel has no problems getting through it and holds more than two cubic meters of material. To do this, a construction worker would have to dig for hours, even in soft ground.
Excavator Komatsu PC 290 NLC: He demolished the overhead line in Munich – Munich
