Land Engineering Services (L.E.S) has bought four of
The trucks will haul overburden at a former open-cast colliery in Scotland, and the deal represents the first venture into Bell ADTs by the Wakefield, County Yorkshire, England-based land restoration and surface mining specialist.
All four trucks are at work at Comrie Colliery, in Fife, which is currently undergoing a massive reclamation scheme.
The operation involves work in varied terrain and often in weather conditions that would render a rigid dump truck inoperable, but L.E.S is said to be reporting record fuel efficiency figures from the ADTs.
Iain Devine, director of Land Engineering Services, said the sheer size of the operation demanded an uplift in handling capacity from its existing 40tonne ADTS.
“We wanted the operation to stick with ADTs, but we need bigger capacity,” he said. “We knew we’d either have to go for ADTs or rigids, but the rigid trucks don’t work nearly as well in adverse conditions, which is an extremely important consideration in Scotland.
“So we decided to go with the Bell B50D, which is still the biggest ADT on the market. They suit the difficult conditions, the site and our overall operation very well.”
Devine said that Bell’s advanced GPS-based Fleetm@tic management system was also showing that the Bell trucks were returning better fuel consumption figures than the 40tonne machines from another manufacturer, which had previously operated on site.
“Fuel consumption on the Bells is between 18 and 22 litres per hour, depending on conditions, gradient and distance, which is a real improvement on what we were getting before,” he said.
The former Comrie Colliery is recognised as the largest area of post-industrial dereliction in County West Fife, with over 100 hectares of land currently unfit for conventional countryside use.
L.E.S will be extracting an estimated 680,000tonnes of remaining coal resource from the site over the next few years and use the revenues to bring the vast area back into use as countryside. The project will include the creation of a new wetland habitat for great newts.
The three B50D trucks are each shifting about 3,000tonnes of overburden per day, approximately 270 tonnes per hour, as part of the project.
Devine said: “We needed the size of ADT that only Bell can currently supply, but the fuel efficiency is a big bonus: fuel is clearly a very big issue at the moment.”
The contract for three of the four new B50Ds was signed at this year’s Hillhead exhibition, with a fourth machine ordered more recently.
Nick Learoyd, sales and marketing manager for Bell UK, said: “Bell has been in talks with Land Engineering Services regarding this deal for more than a year now, so we’re absolutely delighted to finally put pen to paper.
“They’re a great company to work with, and we’re over the moon that L.E.S has put its faith in Bell.”
