During the 1990s, the massive muckshifter Ace of Spades was the undoubted king of the beasts in Britain’s opencast mining jungle.Weighing in at about 4,000 tonnes, the dragline excavator was the biggest of its kind in Europe, operating on the UK’s largest surface mine at Stobswood near Morpeth.With its 300ft-long boom and 100-tonne capacity, claw-like bucket, its job was to eat away at layers of rock, sand and clay so that smaller machines could get in and extract the underlying coal. From 1992 to its retirement in 2002, Ace of Spades moved more than 300 million tonnes of overburden material and was a prominent sight at the 1,500-acre Stobswood mine. Now – after becoming a UK industrial dinosaur and being parked up for several years – the dragline is being dismantled before being shipped across the Atlantic where it will begin a new life in the American mining industry.

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