The huge walking dragline and the Ransome Rapier machine had been used at the Swillington site to remove ‘overburden’ – the top layers of earth at the open cast site – to allow smaller conventional excavators to dig up the rich seam of coal lying below. When the high wall collapsed and the site was flooded it could have indeed been the end of these magnificent machines, but the decision was taken to drain the site, a long drawn-out task that took ten years.
By then the BE 1150-B’s future was still less than secure, as it was nearly 50 years old and it would have been very expensive to bring it up to date and return it to operation. Its future remained undecided until 1998 when the companies that had taken over the site, RJB Mining and their contractors, Miller Mining, agreed that they didn’t need it anymore. Its big sister RR2000 was re-commissioned and continued working until just recently.

My foot! One of the Bucyrus Eyrie 1150-RB dragline’s giant feet. Photos: David Bowers.

Meanwhile, Leeds City Council decided that following the reinstatement of the open cast site; this should become a country park. The National Coal Board had already agreed to give away the land and that their operators would make a donation towards its future use. This allowed the St.Aidan’s Trust to be set up in 1994 to manage the site. In 1999 the new managers, RJB Mining, offered to donate the BE 1150B as a memorial to the Sunshine Miners, those who had worked in the daylight rather than the darkness of an underground mine over the last half century.
Saving the BE I 150-B became a realisable objective when the Heritage Lottery Fund agreed to match the generous donation by RJB Mining, as the scrap value of the dragline was estimated at £75,000 - £150,000. In addition, the European Community and the Science Museum Prism Fund also made donations towards conservation works.
Leeds became a centre for open cast coal mining in this country after its local councillors and Alfred Braithwaite MP successfully lobbied for open cast mining to boost coal production during the Second World War. In addition it was realised that the city had been the home of a number of firms that built earth moving equipment and excavators, such as John Fowler and Sons and Thomas Smith and Sons.
A group of volunteers had already been organised to take on the formidable challenge of assisting the preservation and restoration of this gargantuan piece of equipment for present and future generations - The Friends of the B-E 1150-B Walking Dragline.
The first technical problem was that the excavator was standing on the last remaining coal and it had to be moved before this could be extracted. How could the 1,200-ton machine be moved so that it was no longer in the way? Dismantling the machine was out of the question, so the only solution was to reactivate the machine and walk it to a new position some 50 metres distant.

The bucket scoop.

This called for expert help, so the work was put out to tender and a proposal from Beeby of Retford, Nottinghamshire was successful. They were specialists in the maintenance of heavy duty equipment such as walking draglines and had the expertise to accomplish this seemingly-impossible task. The dragline is electrically powered, but the original electrical system had been out of use for so long and had American 60 c/s phasing, so it could not be reactivated in its entirety. Beeby came up with a halfway-house solution by providing an independent power supply from a massive generator. This would then work the bare minimum number of electrical motors that were needed to slew the boom through 90o and operate the walking feet.



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