Look close at the first picture, they had to put several feet of dirt on the road just to keep the machine from crushing the asphalt. Years ago there was one of these working the strip mines in south east Ohio. They needed to cross I 70 and it took the better part of a week to get that crossing completed, by the time they dealt with traffic and the import and export of dirt to protect the road.

 

They have a couple of bucket wheels like that on the Suncore site in Ft McMurray Alberta (not quite as big as the one shown). they are used for removing overburnen in the Tar sands. Yeah up here the actually mine for oil.
Jim O

 

I saw that thimg on the learning channel once. I tried to fing info on one here a while back that was like one of those small excavators, but had some kind of spider legs on it for climbing extreme angle terrain

 

Might have been this one.

http://www.internationalspecialrepor...inland/20.html