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Truck No. 1 is the one I want. How about you?
Who isn’t like Mongo in that regard (and perhaps in other regards)? Trucks are impressive, powerful, and ultimately very useful things. But while your long-bed, crew-cab, tricked-out, diesel dually with custom-trucker running lights along the top of the cab is, indeed, a thing of profound gravitas, it pales in comparison to the 10 titanic trucks and mega machines found in this very entertaining YouTube video from an outlet called Amazing Stock.
In this video, they are called the “10 Most Amazing Machines.” They say “machines,” but they’re all more or less trucks, if you define trucks loosely. Or the first few are recognizable as trucks, anyway. After that they get into more like tunnelers and gantries and other things, but for our purposes here, let’s just call them trucks.
Watch the whole video above and check out more info on all 10 vehicles from the video encapsulated below.
1962 ZIL-E-167 6x6 was developed by the Soviets to reach far-north towns in any weather (or to invade the U.S. via the North Pole, if you follow certain conspiracy theories). Powered by two rear-mounted ZIL-375 3.5-liter V8s—one source says they’re two 7.0-liters—the E-167 looks like it’d be a blast to go tundra stomping in. It started out with 28-inch tractor wheels from the MAZ-529, but those were too heavy, so the video says they made lighter fiberglass wheels that worked just fine. The whole thing was a magnificent 30 feet long, 9 feet wide and 9 feet high (though another source said it was 10 feet wide and 10 feet high). Curb weight was either 12 tons or 15 tons, and it could carry 5 tons. You can see one at the State Military Technical Museum outside of Moscow.
Sheikh Hamad bin Hamdan Al Nahyan is known for making way oversized replicas of Dodge Power Wagons and Willys Jeeps. But he also built, or had built, this 10-wheeled custom SUV. Because … well, wouldn’t you? Reports say it combines a Jeep Wrangler with an Oshkosh M1075 military truck. Power comes from a 600-hp Caterpillar C15 15.2-liter six-cylinder diesel. The truck itself is 35 feet long. But the Sheikh’s Dodge Power wagon is supposed to have four bedrooms and weigh 50 tons.
The LeTourneau land train was made for the U.S. Army to get around Alaska. Or for logging interests in trackless reaches of the far north. A prototype was made for the Army but never went into production, then LeTourneau offered it to various potential customers. Subsequent designs got bigger and bigger, taking the original 4x4 tractor with three trailers and adding trailers and wheels until it became the longest road train in history. Ultimately, the LeTourneau TC-497 Overland Train MkII had four gas turbine engines in its tractor portion making 1,170 hp each for a total of 4,680 hp, all spinning generators to power the 54 motors, one in each of the train’s 54 wheels. There were ultimately 12 trailers. By the time the Army started looking at it again in 1962, powerful helicopters that could lift whatever the Land Train could haul made it obsolete. Total investment in the project was $3.7 million.
The Self-Propelled Modular Transporter, or SPMT, was designed for moving really, really big things like bridges, oil platforms, houses or ship—things weighing up to 15,000 tons. They are essentially, at least from what we could tell, like big multi-wheeled skateboards that can work together to carry big loads or work independently for smaller hauls. We counted 64 wheels on one of the modules in the video. One setup had four modules, which would be 128 wheels. All wheels swivel. You could use one to haul your yacht around in your boat yard.
This is a Herrington Marmon Rhino 4WD SUV, an amphibious vehicle with hollow half-spheres for wheels. It could tilt 75 degrees in either direction and operate in either 2WD or 4WD. Top speed was 45 mph on land and 4 mph in the water. After 14 years in development, it was permanently parked.
The SLJ932 Segmental Bridge Launching Machine is 300 feet long and made to install roads over bridge pilings. It weighs 580 tons and can install as many as 1,000 spans in its mechanical lifetime. It’s the kind of thing Wile E. Coyote would have ordered from ACME.
The Overburden Conveyor Bridge F60 Mining Machine is the largest machine in the world capable of independent movement. It looks a lot less like a truck and more like a big bridge on tank tracks. It is 1,646 feet long and weighs 15,000 tons. It rides on two separate wheeled chassis with a total of 760 wheels. There is a separate platform substation that produces electricity to run the rig. Half of the wheels on each side have electric drives. It uses 27,000 kW during operation and has a top speed of 29 feet per minute. It’s used in brown coal fields of the Lusatian region that straddles the German-Polish border. Its task is to remove “overburden,” the stuff, mostly dirt, that lies on top of a coal seam. So these things roll through a huge scraped-out section of earth removing dirt until they get down to the coal. They need tracks so they can progress along the overburden and remove it. This was the heaviest land vehicle ever made until something called a Bagger 293 Bucket-Wheel Excavator came along.
Bertha is the name of the world’s largest Earth Pressure Balance Shield Tunneling Machine. It’s built by Hitachi Zosen. Bertha is 326 feet long and weighs 6.1 tons. The end that drills the tunnel is 57.5 feet across. It uses 25,000 hp to spin the bore with 260 special cutters. It’ll go 32 feet per day. It was used to dig a 1.8-mile tunnel in Seattle, then was cut up and melted down. That’s economy of scale.
The Gradall FA 70 Fire Apparatus Boom breaks through walls of burning buildings with a “mace.” The mace then blasts water into the fire. It’s remote-controlled.
OK, this isn’t as big or impressive as the LeTourneau Land Train, but the Colmar T10000 FSC Road Loader can move on tank treads or on railroad tracks; it has both. Top speed is 24 mph on rail.