by Nick Drew | Tue 16 Mar 2021
Muckshift really taking off at New Sydney Airport
The Sydney Western Airport job, known locally as the Badgery’s Creek site is a spectacular sight for anyone remotely interested in heavy equipment and earthmoving. There is a lot of kit and action to see, so much so that the company have provided a big car parking area for people to view the ongoing work.
As one might imagine, interest in the job is high, and the viewing area is receiving a lot of visitors on a daily basis, which includes people of all ages and backgrounds, which isn’t surprising really, as there is something magical about watching big kit shift dirt!
Martin says they have amassed a massive fleet of machines on this site, including 70 motor scrapers, and 30 dozers, and most recently 2 x Caterpillar 24 model motor graders have turned up on the job.
A lot of the work is being undertaken by Lendlease, who our old mate and a former contibutor to this blog, Gary Steen works for, I'm pretty sure Gary has a hand in the management for the fleet of scrapers too.
In addition, there are large fleets of rigid dumptruck's being loaded by large excavators including a Terex/O&K RH170E, a Hitachi EX1200BE-6 and Komatsu PC200-8.
It is estimated that the assembled machines are shifting around half a million cubic metres of earth a week, according to a news report on the project, they will be moving enough earth to fill 10,000 Olympic sized swimming pools during the duration of the project, they are quite litteraly moving mountains on this job.
I would imagine a really good quality telephoto lens of the type aeroplane spotters/photographers use would be a great investment for taking photos of this job, as it does appear that the viewing platform is quite a distance away from the working area.
Checkout this video feature from Australia's 7 News channel as they report on the half way milestone of this massive earthmoving project.
As ever we thank Martin for sharing his photos with us here on the Digger Man Blog.