Overburden Conveyor Bridge
The overburden conveyor bridge is a steel construction with implemented belt-systems. It spans the whole opencast mining area and connects the extraction-side (extraction of overburden) with the side where the overburden was dropped. The F60 served to skim the brown cole, i.e. to seperate it from the overburden (the layers of earth that lie over the layers of coal), so the bridge was not used to actually extract the coal. The steel giant, which weighs 13,500 tons, was able to skim a maximum of 60 metres of overburden. The two excavators were theoretically capable to convey 29,000 cubic metres per hour, which corresponds to a weight of 50,000 tons of overburden. This equals the amount of overburden that would be necessary to fill up a football field up to a height of 8 metres. The maximum annual production capacity of the whole complex was 130 million cubic metres.