Wigan Album

Is it Penldlebury or Sennicar? Reason I ask is that Pendlebury is a stone bridge, whilst Sennicar is a more modern steel/iron section bridge. Suggesting the former is original, whilst the latter a 20th Century replacement.

Previous comment (Pendlebury Or Sennicar?) was due to thinking machine was involved in bridge repair/construction. Clearly the machine would be too big to use the stone bridge, hence the temporary one.

Any idea what work theexcavator was involved in?

Excellent photo, Graham.

There were opencast coal workings in the very late 1940s through to the early 1950s on either side of the canal,both north and south of Pendlebury Lane. The machine is a rope operated face shovel typically used in opencast mining, belonging to Wimpey's, again an opencast mining contractor. It looks like a Ruston Bucyrus RB 150 but I am not entirely sure.
My guess is that it came to grief when being transferred from one side of the canal to the other as the bailey bridge wasn't man enough for the weight of the excavator. I wouldn't liked to have been the engineer who designed and specified the bailey bridge!

I remember going along the canal to have a look at this machine in the water, there were two machines scheduled to go across that day the first and much bigger machine had made the crossing earlier. The bailey bridge held for the first but gave way as the second crossed. The first machine had much longer caterpillar tracks so that during the crossing its weight was shared with the canal banks. A steel wire rope was secured to a large bulldozer to stop this one from toppling even further. If memory serves me well - the canal was drained of water a channel was dug the machine crawled out being aided by the Cat D8 bulldozer pulling on the wire rope. All the machines were being used on the open cast coal mining around the Red Rock area in the early 1950s.