The WABCO 353FT Once the King of Elevating Scrapers

The classics continue again this week, with yet another exceptional find by our American friend and outstanding heavy equipment enthusiast Anthony Lucibello who has tracked down yet another massive beast of burden.

Since its introduction in 1966 the WABCO 333FT was the largest production elevating scraper available on the market, a sector that WABCO (Westinghouse Air Brake Company) led the way in. That model featured a 34-cubic yard bowl and a twin engine combined horsepower output of 950hp. However, in 1977 the company launched an even bigger model the 353FT.

The 353FT was capable of carrying a heaped bowl capacity of 36-cubic yards, with power coming from twin Detroit Diesel 12v71T engines which punched out 1050hp, it was a bit of a monster that’s for sure!

This machine is still working to this day and is currently on a job in South Jersey, USA. According to Anthony the owner has a unique way of moving this giant of a machine around. Apparently, due to its height, he opts to move it from job to job, by hooking up the front of the machine to a ‘lowboy’ (low loader in UK speak) and just towing the machine along on its back wheels, not sure on the legality of that, but I’m sure it would be a sight to see!

As a reference for size the machine is seen parked next to a Cat 938K wheeled loader above!

Elevating scrapers, or as our American friends call them ‘paddle pans’ were never that popular overall, with most firms still preferring to opt for conventional scraper bowls, push loaded by dozers, so the run of production of these machines from a WABCO perspective, came to an end in 1980 when the company withdrew from scraper manufacturing.

One would imagine that these 353FT’s are pretty rare now, although Anthony did say he knows of another guy who currently runs two of them down in Australia, it would be awesome to find out about those if any of our Australian readers know of them?

The Digger Man Blog would once again like to thank Anthony for the share of his photos for this blog post.

As an update, I have come across some old footage of one of these 353FT's working in Australia owned at the time by Footstool Earthmoving Pty, but has since been sold on to Goodmans in New Zealand, enjoy the action and that sound!