Ace of Spades re-visited

by Nick Drew | Thu 04 Feb 2016

Ace of Spades re-visited

I was contacted last week by regular reader Bev Walker, to see if I had any more photos of the P&H 757 walking dragline which was more commonly known as the Ace of Spades. So I am happy to oblige with a few more bits of material from the Digger Man Blog archives.

Back in its heyday the 4,000 tonne Ace of Spades was the undisputed king of the opencast coal mining industry in Europe. The “Ace of Spades” only UK rival was the other well-known dragline “Big Geordie” which first entered service in 1969 and had an operating weight of 3,000 tonnes. Sadly for that machine after failed attempts to sell her on as a working machine, she had a one way date with the “gas axe” and was cut up for scrap.

Working at the Stobswood surface mine near Morpeth in Northumberland, the P&H 757 “Ace of Spades” was equipped with a 300ft-long boom and a bucket that had a capacity of 100 tonnes and was an impressive structure by any stretch of the imagination.

It’s estimated that from the start of its working life in February 1992, the Ace of Spades shifted in excess of 300 million tonnes of overburden material until it was officially retired in 2002. The machine cleared the way for more conventional smaller hydraulic machines to come in and extract the rich seams of coal which lay beneath.

After lying around for a number of years a buyer was eventually found in the USA and as such she didn’t face the sad ending that befell Big Geordie.

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