Classic kit on land drainage works

by Nick Drew | Fri 25 Mar 2016

Classic kit on land drainage works

I have recently completed an article on some JCB machines that are working on land drainage works in Lincolnshire. Having chatted with the operators during my site visit, I was enthused to look back at some of the machines they mentioned having spent time on in the past.

I have sourced these photos from the excellent German Facebook page Historische Baumaschinen and I thank the guys for allowing me to reproduce them here on the Digger Man Blog. In the Lincoln area back in the late 60’s and 70’s two British brands of excavators were dominant in the area, Priestman who’s machines were manufactured in Hull, and Ruston Bucyrus who manufactured their machines in Lincoln itself. A popular machine with the drainage boards was Priestman’s Mustang MK1 model, an example of which is seen here in its “river rig” configuration. 67786_393676830710206_2146313798_n

Priestman’s big machine back in the day and one of my personal favourites having spent many an hour on one as a kid is the Mustang 220. This example was being owned and operated by the Kent River Authority and features a dipper arm extension. 10507033_824887707589114_4213225572057463841_o

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Being assembled in the Lincoln area the Ruston Bucyrus RH-150 and its bigger brother the RH-220 were reasonably popular excavators, although the production run for these machines was not very long in the wider scheme of things. The RH-150 in this shot does not feature any special river rig specification, except maybe a longer than standard dipper arm. 1891291_656008537810366_3302634040854742981_n

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JCB have also had a long established connection with land drainage boards and in this shot we see what I believe is 6D model with long dipper and extra wide track pads in action on dyke work. 10806476_720052631405956_5705735359376666553_n

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Look out for my article on some current land drainage board machines at work in the Lincoln area in a future issue of Earthmovers.

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