by Nick Drew | Tue 28 Jan 2014
Greece is the word – old kit still earning its keep
We have made some good friends on the internet over the years on the blog, and a couple of our readers live and work in Greece, where it’s not unusual to see many items of older plant still putting in a good days work.
One of those readers is Xristos Voyrnas who runs a groundwork and civil engineering business in the Kalamata region in Southern Greece. Kalamata is a famous area for the growing of olives and olive oil production, and despite the recent economic woes that the country has been going through building work still continues unabated. However, many of the firms over there make far better use of old kit than we do in our “throwaway” culture. As we reported once before on Xristos and his company, they are still running classic machines from the likes of Poclain, O&K and Caterpillar. In this shot we see an ensemble of these three classic makes in the form of a Cat 955L tracked loading shovel, O&K RH9 PMS hydraulic excavator and a Poclain 90B wheeled excavator in the background.
And how about this for a stunning backdrop, as we see the Poclain 90B rigged up with a hammer. As I look out of my window today here in a wet and windy Devon, it’s nice to dream of working in a warm climate like this with wall to wall sunshine!
I suspect Xristos’s Poclain “Rubber Duck” does a fair bit of hammer work, possibly running around on the road from job to job breaking out ahead of smaller machines. In this shot we see the 90B breaking out next to a rare Zeppelin ZR55 midi excavator. These Zeppelin machines from the mid to late 1990’s were in fact badged Schaeff machines.
Flying the flag for Britain in Xristos’s machine fleet is this JCB 3CX Sitemaster model, seen here with its support crew of mountain goats!
And finally in this batch another shot of the Caterpillar 955L and the O&K RH9 PMS tackling a reinforced concrete wall prior to loading away on the truck in the background. It’s great to see all these classic machines still hard at work, which I’m sure can’t be easy day in day out. One would suspect breakdowns would be a common occurrence but fair play to all concerned for keeping the gear going!
We have lots more of these pictures to share from Xristos and another Greek reader over the coming weeks.