Industrial Project Near Allentown, PA. The 7 rock drills are sitting on a 30 to 50 foot cut (solid rock). Large Excavator is a Cat 385 loading cat 773 rock trucks. Enjoy!

I hope they didn't bid this for scrapers??? RT

No not scrapers. It seems most in this area are doing away with scrapers and going with the articulated rock trucks. I know a contractor that has his scrapers up frosale and is having trouble selling them because of the lack of demand.

Matt,who's the contractor and where is this one.Thanks Mike

I know that spot. I have been past it before. Surprising My future Brother-in-law is not there pushing the qualities of Volvo. I might be out that way in a month or so. My wife is hinting that we need to go see her sister. Even though she will be here next week.
Terry

Matt, I don't know much about modern construction ways. How can an articulated rock truck replace a scraper? A truck doesn't dig up earth. GWH

Must be a matter of production rates, scrapers are not going to work in rock/shale conditions, those tires are not cheap and when an operator spins em in shale, he'll soon be out of a job, also hard to say how excavators & haul trucks would replace them in other conditions where the soils can be loaded into a scraper, it's been awhile since I worked for large site contractors, but on an open large site, where cuts and fills are significant over a large area, it's hard to understand how an excavator and haul trucks would be more productive, unless working off a face. We used to side load 627's and TS-24's etc. with excavators sometimes, certain areas, too wet, or wanted the material spread when dumped instead of stockpiled. I'm sure a lot of things have changed, but also wonder why they are losing popularity in that area too.

I travel 200 miles each way each week between ranches and I run at night. There are several places where I go through construction zones where they are widening highways. Most of the work would have been done by scrapers in the past. Now it is being done by excavators and trucks and a lot of work is done at night.

GWH,you ask how can a excavator and trucks replace scrapers.We use to run 20-30 TS-24's and Cat 657 scraper in the past.Now we only have 5 ts-24's left.A big excavator ( Cat 5110 size) will out load the scrapers any day. Plus with the cost of fuel the twin engine scapers get rather $$$ to run.That with the fact that noone wants to run them anymore you can't beat the big hoe or big loader(992).we only strip the topsoil with ours,then the 992's and 5110 get down to business.Just to give you some yardage on the 5110 we loaded out 463 773's load in a 10 hour day.Everything was really clicking that day.the 2 D9 operators on the fill were beat that day.The bucket on the 5110 was rated at 10 yards but we put on sideboards on it and made it into a 12-13 yard.The 773's were also sideboarded. We 3 pass each truck. On that job we were doing around 75,000 in the six day work week.

GWH,
On the Hwy project here South of me, they are running 3 dump trks., and a Cat 385 or 992 JD to load them. There is 2 CaT 627G and 3 621 scrapers. I know the owner and last year was the first year they had the trucks and he said they are good. You only need a driver to get from point A to B and back to A again. He don't have to know how to cut grade or read grade stakes which is getting hard to find operators to do and do a good job. He asked me if I was retired and I said yes. He said the best operaters are the retired ones. He has one guy that is 70 some years old and has to use a oxygen tank in order to work. catskinner