There’s something special about rolling through the outdoor grounds of the Reynolds-Alberta Museum in Wetaskiwin in an old classic car, the driver pointing out machines that once moved mountains of earth. On that driven tour you come around a bend and suddenly there it is — the 1929 Bucyrus-Erie 200-B stripping shovel. Yellow and red, weather-worn, towering over the prairie grass. Even from a distance it feels enormous. Up close it is almost unbelievable.
This is no ordinary piece of old equipment. The 200-B is a stripping shovel, designed to sit on top of a coal seam and peel away the rock and soil so the coal below could be reached. Built in 1929 by Bucyrus-Erie, only a handful of these machines were ever made, and this one is the last remaining example of the four that once operated in North America. That alone makes it a rare survivor.
It started its working life in the United States, then made its way north in the early 1950s from a mine in Colstrip, Montana. Once in Alberta it spent the rest of its career at the Roselyn Mine (sometimes called the Sheerness or Western Dominion Mine) southeast of Hanna. Originally it travelled on railway tracks laid along the coal seam. Later it was converted to the crawler tracks you see today, giving it more freedom to move. Powered by electricity, it needed a long trailing cable and a portable transformer that had to be relocated whenever the machine reached the end of its reach.
At roughly 335 tonnes and capable of taking a five-cubic-metre bite with each pass, the 200-B was actually considered one of the smaller stripping shovels of its era. Standing beside it, “small” is not the word that comes to mind. The house alone is the size of a small building, the boom reaches high into the Alberta sky, and the whole machine still radiates the quiet authority of something built to work hard for decades.
Seeing it from the seat of a classic car on the museum’s driven tour makes the experience even better. You’re not just looking at a static display — you’re rolling past living industrial history on the same grounds where these giants now rest. The Reynolds Museum has collected an impressive outdoor coal-mining exhibit, and the 200-B is one of its true stars.
Next time you’re in the Wetaskiwin area, take the tour if you can. There’s nothing quite like looking up at a nearly century-old machine that once carved its way through the prairie and realizing just how much power and ingenuity went into keeping Alberta’s coal mines running. The 200-B may no longer dig, but it still commands attention — a yellow-and-red reminder of the days when machines this big truly ruled the landscape.
