TECHNOLOGICAL PROGRESS
IN UNDERGROUND MINING

There is a great variety of technologies that might be considered in underground mining—mine construction, transport, ventilation, safety, and so on. But I shall concentrate on only one part of the picture—the coal extraction process at the face and the delivery of the coal to the haulage point.

As already mentioned, most flat and gently sloping seams in Soviet mines are worked by the long-wall method. Without going into all the details of mine layout, I can describe the method as one in which, after a face 100 meters or so in length is prepared, the coal removal operation moves back and forth across that face, totally extracting the panel as the operations proceed. The roof is supported only in the immediate vicinity of the face, and as the face recedes, the roof collapses behind the working. The support system might use wooden props or, as a more modern method, metal supports. Metal supports can be hydraulically powered and can also be designed to move themselves forward by a hydraulic mechanism. When a whole set of such mechanized supports is arranged in a line along the face, they constitute a kind of movable shield. The central elements in long-wall technology are removing the coal from the face, getting it to the haulway, and controlling the roof. The progression of technologies in this kind of coal mining has been from hand operations with picks, to mechanical undercutting and blasting the coal off the face, to the use of continuous mining machines (combines is the Soviet term) that move across the face, tearing off the coal and loading it onto a face conveyor. Progress in roof control has moved from wooden pit props to metal supports, and ultimately to the creation of hydraulically powered, self-advancing mechanical supports.

The final step in the evolution of this technology is the introduction of complexes of equipment, in which transport out of the working area is by a conveyor running parallel to the face, on the frame of which moves a coal cutting device. Behind the conveyor frame is a line of hydraulically operated roof supports, attached to the frame of the conveyor. As each pass is made across the face, the whole complex (including a flexible conveyor) is moved forward into position for the next pass.

The first generation of combines introduced in the USSR after World War II were “wide-web,” which, as they passed across the face, removed a section a meter or more thick. These have now largely been supplanted by “narrow-web” combines that make a much shallower cut (0.6–1 meters into the face). An alternative kind of equipment used for long-wall mining is the scraper or plow, but scrapers have been used only slightly in the USSR—in 1973 only 3 percent of underground coal was so produced (Ugol’, 1974:2, p. 24).

The technological challenge is to design equipment that will work, to differentiate it for variations in thickness and pitch of seam, strength of coal, character of the roof, and so on. The major preoccupation of Soviet coal mining R and D has been with this kind of equipment, and the following section reviews the Soviet history of development with an eye to understanding and evaluating the innovation process.

Combines

The development of continuous mining machines began in the USSR in the early postwar period with the creation of the Donbass-1 wide-web combine. The experimental model was created in 1948 by Dongiprouglemash. Series production began in January 1949, with the first lot of 50 being prepared in the first two months of the year. Total output in 1949 was 255 machines, and another 400 were produced in 1950. Thus, there was rather rapid mastery of this machine; it is said to have been based on an earlier cutting machine, the MV-60, and there was a high degree of parts commonality. The Donbass-1 was described in 1957 by an official of the Joy Manufacturing Corporation as the “best of the Soviet continuous mining machines, a very good machine, and a machine of their own design and invention” (U.S. Congress: House, 1957). Criticisms of it by its Soviet users are somewhat less flattering— they say that it was not reliable, that it wore out rapidly and was difficult to repair. It was also suited to only a fairly narrow range of the conditions found in Soviet mines.

The Donbass-1 became the major wide-web combine used in Soviet mines—by January 1959, there were 1300 of them at work (Bratchenko, 1960, p. 83)—this was more than a third of all combines on hand. A considerable effort went into improving it over the period when it was being produced, mainly in the direction of increasing its power and in adapting it to differences in seam thickness and coal strength. Some five modified models were developed to handle thicker seams, to deal with viscous coal, and to work from the frame of a conveyor. In 1959, the original Donbass-1 model was taken out of production and in the early sixties there was fairly rapid replacement with various modifications (especially the LGD-2), all of the wide-web type.

The potential advantages of narrow-web combines were already well understood in the fifties, and in the USSR, as in Western Europe, they were being experimented with (Ugol’, 1964:11, p. 11). The short advance required in each cycle with narrow-web combines makes it possible for the mechanical roof supports to bridge the whole distance between the face and the line of roof fall, and in particular to eliminate props in the space where the combine and the conveyor work. The short advance also facilitates employment of flexible conveyors, so that it is not necessary to disassemble the conveyor for each move. The narrow-web miner moves faster across the face, so that more cycles are accomplished in a given period of time. Also, it seems that it is easier for narrow-web combines to work by the shuttle method (i.e., back and forth), so that they do not have to be moved and set up again at the opposite end of the face after each cycle, an operation that took a lot of time with the older combines. In short, narrow-web combines have been the main technical direction for increasing productivity in long-wall mining. Even more important, they were the precondition for the development of self-advancing complexes.

The transition to narrow-web machines took place rather rapidly in Western Europe. A Soviet writer reports that already by 1957 over half of all underground coal output was mined by narrow-web technology in West Germany, France, Belgium, and Holland (Ugol’, 1960:10, p. 63). The Soviet coal industry, however, was rather slow in making this transition to narrow-web machines, and as a corollary, to the use of complexes. The USSR began development work on narrow-web combines at more or less the same time as in Western Europe and apparently also at the time envisaged moving from wide-web to narrow-web technology. An experimental prototype of such a combine was developed at the Malakovskii experimental plant and was tested in a mine in 1958. After some modifications it began to be produced under the designation K-52M and began to replace the Donbass-1 combine in several mines beginning in 1959 (Ugol’, 1960:7, pp. 18–20; and 1962:8, pp. 2–4). This miner was fairly quickly and successfully integrated into a complex—the OMKT—in the Moscow basin. That complex is described as “the pride of Soviet coal miners” and its developers were awarded a Lenin Prize in 1961 (Mel’nikov, 1968b, p. 137). A second narrow-web model—the DU-1—was produced and intended for rapid diffusion in the Donbass mines. It was planned to have 500 of them at work by 1958 (Ugol’, 1960:2, p. 13). But the rate of progress in moving to narrow-web technology in the industry as a whole, and in the Donbass especially, was slow. In 1964, 616 wide-web combines were produced compared to only 355 narrow-web ones (Ugol’, 1965:3, p. 1), and it was only at the end of the sixties that narrow-web combines came to account for half the stock (Ugol’, 1969:4, p. 76).

One of the first of the new models (the DU-1) was apparently poorly conceived to take advantage of narrow-web potential, and this led to a controversy over the advantage of the narrow-web principle in general. An engineer whose views (I would judge) reflected those of the miners set off a debate with an article in the February 1960 issue of Ugol’, arguing that in practice the narrow-web approach was less advantageous than the wide-web and suggesting that the latter be retained as the main direction of technical advance. To judge from the responses in the journal (in issues 7 and 10 in 1960 and issues 2 and 3 of 1961), one would gather that his was an eccentric view—most of the respondents repudiated his argument and held that the advantages of narrow-web technology were clear. But there must have been a stronger support for his view than appeared on the surface. Several years later it was said that the slow progress toward the creation of complexes was explained by the obstinate but futile efforts of the design institutes in the Ukraine to develop new wide-web models and the appropriate kind of mechanized support systems to work with them in complexes ( Ugol’, 1964:4, p. 12). Another comment suggests that the NII of the branch had been very dilatory in creating specifications for the design of new narrow-web combines (Ugol’, 1965:3, p. 6), which may indicate that there were still some serious doubts on the part of the technological decision makers about narrow-web machines.

One of the interesting features of that debate was that the proponents of narrow-web technology generally referred to the experience of Western countries as demonstrating its high productivity and technical advantages. As with most controversies in the Soviet system, we can find in the literature only limited information about the nature of the dispute, but it may be that this is another example of the USSR outgrowing the effects of earlier technical isolation, and that it took a while to reorient the technical lines that had grown up in this isolation. Whatever conservatism there may have been on the part of the users and the R and D organs, it could only have been reinforced by the inertia of the machinery producers. For well-known reasons they much preferred to keep on producing familar models rather than introducing new ones.

By the mid-sixties the competitive advantage of narrow-web combines was no longer an issue (an all-Union conference in 1966 on generalizing experience with the new equipment underlined that this was the most important technical direction for developing the coal industry in the Seven Year Plan— Ugol’, 1966:10, p. 70), but the development of the complex in which to employ them, including proper conveyors and self-advancing supports, still took quite a bit of time. Apart from the OMKT complex already mentioned (which was limited in its application primarily to the Moscow basin), the most important of the narrow-web complexes was the KM-87. It is considered one of the successes of Soviet coal mining R and D, and its developers, too, were awarded a state prize in 1968 (Smekhov, 1970, p. 3). It is worth recounting the development history of this complex in some detail because it gives us some insight into what kind of systemic difficulties have slowed the creation and diffusion of new equipment in Soviet underground mining.

The KM-87 Complex

Giprouglemash first started work on this complex in 1957. The first 12 experimental sections of the M-87 hydraulic support, intended for use in a complex, had been produced and tested by 1960. The combine for it was the K-52M narrow-web combine described earlier. The KM-87 complex was first put together in the form of a single prototype produced at the Malakovskii factory in 1960 and sent for testing in the Stalin mine of the Lugansk regional economic council. After a couple of months of tests (24 November 1960 to 29 January 1961) it was concluded that an experimental lot (opytnaia partiia) should be produced (Shcherban’, 1969, vol. 2, pp. 236–238). This task was assigned to the Toretskii plant, which was supposed to produce seven units of this complex in 1960–1961, but produced none. Of the eight units specified in the plan for 1962, only four were produced ( Ugol’, 1963:6, p. 5). Apparently the experimental lot was finally completed by the end of 1963, and finally, by the first quarter of 1964, five complexes were put into mines for testing (Ugol’, 1964:8, pp. 54–55). The tests revealed many defects in the design, such as leakages in the hydraulic system, unreliable linkage to the conveyor, and inadequate strength in the roof bars. But the experimental use was considered sufficiently encouraging that it was decided to produce a larger batch of 20 in 1964, with some improvements (Ugol’, 1964:8, p. 55), though apparently only four of that intended batch of 20 were produced (Ugol’, 1975:5, p. 26).

Concurrent with these delays, Giprouglemash was experimenting with adaptations for thicker seams and sloping seams, and some of these modifications may have been incorporated in the models produced for testing. In any case, by the end of 1964 the test program was essentially complete, and a decision was made to begin series production of the KM-87 complex.

The Toretskii plant was supposed to focus all its attention in 1965 on series productions of M-100 and M-87 hydraulic supports (Ugol’, 1965:3, p. 4), but 1965 was mostly a year of slippage; only in 1966 did the KM-87 begin to be produced in significant numbers. Even then plans were badly underfulfilled—although output was planned at 140 units in 1965 and 200 in 1966 (Ugol’, July, 1965, p. 38), by 1 January 1968, there were only 82 complexes at work, and by 1 January 1969, 147. In 1968 the total amount of coal produced with the help of this equipment was 20.1 MT, or only 4.5 percent of all underground output (Smekhov, 1970, p. 219). In short, it took about 11 years to develop this complex and get it working to a significant degree.

For widespread adoption, the original complex had also to be prepared in many modifications to deal with variations in conditions of slope, kinds of coal, and different seam thicknesses. Without going into the details, each of these modifications involved a similar history of slippages and delays.

Despite the delays in development, the KM-87 is a success in the sense that it works, and has been effective in raising productivity. I would conclude that the designers seem to have handled their part of the task well. Also, once the machine was actually available, mine management was eager to adopt it. The villains of the piece, the ones responsible for the long lag between design and commercial diffusion, seem to be the machinery plants.

The variation in conditions in Soviet mines means that, even with modifications, the KM-87 complex can be used at only a small fraction of all the active faces, and to do for the other cases what the KM-87 did for some, it is necessary to develop many additional types of combines, supports, conveyors, and other items. As an indication of how many cases are involved, one source says that 13 types of mechanized supports and complexes, eight types of narrow-web combines, three scrapers, and nine types of movable conveyors are being produced in series. In addition, industrial prototypes exist for 15 more types of mechanized support, 14 more narrow-web combines, and 12 conveyors (Ugol’, 1974:2, p. 24). In this broad range of equipment types the successes have been fairly rare in relation to the number of failures. When we look at this broader range of cases, the design organizations do not always come off so well, and it is less plausible to assert that responsibility for failures rests primarily on the machinery plants.

One author describes the experience with the MK-1 combine: Giprouglemash designed the MK-1 combine in 1958, prototypes were produced and testing showed the machine to be unsuitable. In 1964, a new model was designed and a lot of 22 was produced, but this model was again found ineffective. In 1967, a third model, put out in 70 units, suffered the same fate. The author concluded, “Over this ten year period about 5 million rubles were spent on the creation of these three machines, and the coal industry still has not gotten the machine it needs” (Koshkarev, 1972, p. 153). He then goes on to say that this same institute (Giprouglemash in Donetsk) has worked on developing equipment for thin seams for many years but has still not created the needed equipment. The Minister of the Ukrainian Coal Ministry says that DonUgi also has worked on this problem for four years at a cost of 1.2 million rubles and has not yet produced the machine (Izvestiia, 2 April 1975).

On the whole, however, I believe that the greatest weakness in the system is the problem of producing the new models that the design organizations develop. It seems often to be accepted that the basic designs are suitable, the prototypes have been tested and accepted, but the production plants have failed to execute them in reliable versions or have neglected to produce them in the quantities needed (see Ugol’, 1967:2, p. 33). As one source puts it, the technology for dealing with flat and gently sloping seams of thin to average thickness is perfected; all that is holding them back is “the small output and unsatisfactory quality of the corresponding equipment” (Ugol’, 1967:1, p. 17). Another complains that “domestic mechanized supports, combines, and other equipment sometimes lag behind foreign models in the quality of manufacture of particular assemblies and parts, which significantly affect their reliability and durability .... Domestic combines mine 130–150 thousand tons before capital repair, foreign ones 400–500 thousand tons (Iatskov, 1976, p. 18). The difficulty is often the failure of other branches and plants to supply adequate components and materials. One of the biggest problems with the narrow-web machines and plows is in the quality of the chain. These machines work by gripping, and moving along, a chain stretched across the face, and Soviet industry seems to have been simply unable to provide chains of the requisite quality. Chains for the scraper conveyors are also a problem. Two solutions (both of which the Soviet Union is now using) are to either import that one crucial item from abroad or drop the chain method in favor of cables that pull the machine across the face.

The slow advance of new underground mining technology seems to be a classic illustration of the unresponsiveness of the suppliers to the needs of the client due to “departmental barriers” characteristic of the Soviet economy. Coal-mining machinery has been produced in the Ministry of Heavy, Energy, and Transport Machine Building (Mintiazhmash), for which coal-mining machinery is a minor sideline. Mintiazhmash habitually underfulfills the production targets for coal-mining machinery and fails to add the capacity the investment plan calls for. There is poor communication between its production plants and the R and D design institutes in the coal industry responsible for developing new models of machines. For a while it was thought that the problem could be solved by having the Ministry of the Coal Industry control the R and D funds for coal-mining machinery development. The funds were allocated to Minugol’, which then contracted for development work by design bureaus in Mintiazhmash (Resheniia Partii i pravitel’stva po khoziaistvennym voprosam, vol. 8, M, 1972, p. 531). This seems not to have worked either, and in 1973, jurisdiction over the coal mining machine plants themselves were transferred to Minugol’. We may properly be skeptical that this shift will do much to improve performance. Two years after this shift had taken place, B. F. Bratchenko, the Minister of the Coal Industry stated:

Much remains to be straightened out in machine building for the coal industry. . . . Granted, production here is already being converted to the output of equipment needed by the miners, and combines for operation on thin and steep seams are being put into production. Nonetheless, the work of the All-Union Coal Machinery Association cannot be termed satisfactory. Managerial mistakes have led to interruptions in the production process and a slowdown in the rate of output. [Izvestiia, 13 December 1975]

Obviously many of the incentive problems that inhibit innovation in Soviet industry generally can be expected to continue even when the coal mines and the producers of coal-mining machinery have a common ministerial boss.

EQUIPMENT FOR STRIP MINING

One of the principal means for raising productivity in the coal industry is to change the proportions in favor of strip mining, which has a strong advantage in capital cost per unit capacity and in labor productivity (cf. Tables 4-1 and 4-2). As for other advantages, safety is increased, and the time required to put a facility into production is shorter.

Given the existence of appropriate reserves, in locations where the coal can be shipped to market economically, the advantage of strip over underground mining is largely a function of the progress of stripping technology, which primarily has taken the form of larger equipment. Increases in the unit size of equipment have reduced the cost of removing overburden, thus moving the frontier of competition progressively against underground mining. Unfortunately, the need to expand coking coal output has limited the shift from underground mining in the USSR, since Soviet reserves of coking coal that are strippable are relatively small. Furthermore, most coal suitable for strip mining is in the East, though in the European USSR the Dnepr and Moscow basins, both producing lignite, have some strippable resources. In both the latter cases the beds lie relatively horizontally, and the layer of overburden is not terribly thick. Two large mines in the Moscow basin use large draglines to shift the overburden to the worked out area. In the Dnepr fields the overburden is soft enough to strip with bucket-wheel excavators, with transport by bridge conveyors. In the East, the situation is geologically more complicated; faulted and sloping seams are common. In such cases the mines must be excavated progressively deeper and wider, with the spoil moved outside the mine. A notable exception in the East is the Kansk-Achinsk basin, which has a thin overburden and a flat, thick coal seam.

Since the mid-fifties, the Russians have increased underground output mostly in order to meet the growing demand for coking coal and in a few cases have increased underground output of steam coal on the basis of the locational advantage of particular mines. Otherwise, the policy has been to meet incremental needs for coal by strip mining. During the 8th Five Year Plan, 65–67 percent of the output increment was to come from strip mines, though in actual fulfillment this figure turned out to be only about 56 percent. During the 9th Five Year Plan, the share of strip-mined coal in both the planned and realized increment was about 68 percent, and during the 10th Five Year Plan the share will be somewhat lower—52–53 percent according to the plan targets. The problem is the difficulty in finding ways of using the huge strip mine potential of the eastern regions. Several of the associated R and D problems involved are discussed in Chapter 7, and the discussion here will be limited to the technology of strip mining itself.

Productivity in strip mining, and hence its competitiveness, can be increased by improving equipment. Among the choices to be made in designing the production scheme for a strip mine are the “system” to be used and the size of the mine. The major systems that the Russians distinguish are: (1) “the transportless system,” in which overburden is removed to the spoil area by dragline excavators; (2) the transport system, using either trucks or rail transport for moving overburden and coal; and (3) removal of overburden to the spoil bank by conveyors. (Hydraulic mining is another possibility but is insignificant in the total.) Whatever system is chosen, there must then be decisions about the kinds of equipment to be used—i.e., between mechanical shovels, draglines, or bucket-wheel excavators for excavating overburden and coal; and between conveyor, truck, or railroad haulage. For each kind of equipment, decisions must be made about size and such technical parameters as the power characteristics of transport equipment, given the average and ruling gradients, distances, and so on. Finally, all these different elements must be coordinated in a system-optimizing manner. Every mine is more or less a special case, and a detailed critique of technological decisions would have to analyze each mine or type of mine separately.* Lacking the expertise to go into the subject at that level, I shall try instead to develop what I believe are some general conclusions about the decisions that have been made in designing the projects and equipment for strip mining.

First, it seems fairly well agreed that too little emphasis has been given to the transportless method, the share of which in stripping work has remained more or less steady at around a third. A very thorough survey done at the beginning of the Seven Year Plan acknowledges the transportless method as the cheapest and says that the industry has tried to expand its use as “domestic plants have mastered production of the basic equipment” (Zasiadko, 1959, pp. 264–265). Another author specifically states that, had bigger draglines been available, economic advantage would have called for more use of the transportless system (Loginov, 1971).

Second, Soviet mine designers have apparently underrated the potential of trucks as an alternative to railroad haulage of overburden and coal. The share of trucks in hauling overburden was long almost imperceptible, though it is now beginning to creep up to nearly a fifth. Even for coal, trucks account for only about a third of the total moved. Bigger trucks and more robust design would have enhanced their competitiveness compared to rail transport. As one author says, “the currently held notion as to the limited applicability of trucks in open-pit mining of coal is explained primarily by the lack of large capacity haulage equipment which would correspond to a rational system of coal mining” (Ugol’, 1966:5, p. 24). Another explains further that, “the high cost of truck transport in existing mines is explained by the relatively small haulage capacities of the trucks used, and by the rapid wearing out of engines and tires, which necessitates very large outlays for repair” (ANSSSR, 1968, p. 140).

In both cases there was a failure to take advantage of the savings inherent in large unit sizes for equipment. Soviet strip mines for coal tend to be very large, so that they could economically use very high capacity equipment. In the United States, the nature of the market, the size of the deposits, and transport considerations keep numerous relatively small producers competitive (Christenson, 1962). The average output per strip mine in the USSR is over 3 million tons per year, whereas the average in the United States is only a little over 100 thousand tons per year. For a benchmark to suggest what size equipment would be economically suitable for the Soviet industry or some notion of the relevant current technical level in the United States, we should thus take as the U.S. analogue the relatively small fraction of U.S. mines that are in the same size class as the Soviet ones.

It is not completely clear whether the failure to take advantage of larger equipment represents a mistake on the part of those who design the open-pit operations or a constraint imposed by the inability of the supplying industries to create the equipment. My interpretation is that, although there may be some biases on the customer side, the problem is largely on the supply side. Soviet mining experts seem to be well aware of the advantages of larger equipment but have not been able to get it as soon as they wanted it or in the quantities they want. The best way to clarify this question is to look at the development history of particular kinds of equipment.

Excavators

The history of excavators shows a struggle to get larger models produced and a persistent lag behind what the Soviet coal industry wants, what would seem to be technically and economically feasible, and what is being supplied to mines in other countries. A brief history of the development of various excavator models will be helpful to show the sequence in which various sizes were produced and the delays in getting any given size produced.

Consider first mechanical shovels. Before the Second World War, the Russians had no large excavating equipment, and this is one of the main reasons they did almost no strip mining (in 1940, less than 4 percent of output was from strip mines). During the Second World War the USSR acquired a number of foreign shovels (presumably under Lend-Lease) larger than any they had themselves produced, which became the basis for considerable expansion of strip mining in the Ural region (Mel’nikov, 1957, p. 20) *. The first domestic model, developed after the Second World War, was the SE-3, a shovel with a 3-meter bucket, produced in the Ural Heavy Machine Building Plant (Uralmashzavod) during 1947–1956. A large number of these were produced —the thousandth one had been produced by the end of 1954 (Rozenfel’d, 1961, p. 446). One author, discussing strategy for new models at a later date, attributes the success of the SE-3 to the fact that, by specifying what it most needed in the form of one model, the coal industry was successful in focussing the attention of the producing plants on producing that model in large numbers (Ugol’, 1970:8, pp. 47–49). It was given a 4-meter bucket in some applications, and after 1956 essentially the same shovel, but with more improvements, was produced under the designation EKG-4†

(Mel’nikov, 1958, p. 21). At some later date further modifications were made to produce a model with a somewhat larger bucket—the EKG-4.6. Soviet writers seem to agree that this was a very successful model. Mel’nikov says it was the best in the world in its time (Mel’nikov, 1966, p. 104).

The next step up was the EKG-8 fitted with either a 6- or an 8-meter bucket in different versions. The design work on this shovel was done by the Izhorsk plant, beginning in 1955 (Mel’nikov, 1968, p. 55), and it was produced from 1957 by Uralmashzavod. By the end of 1964, 30 of these machines were in operation, and by the end of 1966, 76 (Ugol’, 1967:11, pp. 20–21). Another model, the EVG-6, was adapted for stripping work from the basic EKG-8 design.

As of 1970, the three shovels so far described (SE-3, EKG-4–4.6, EKG (EVG) -8) accounted for almost two-thirds of all mechanical shovels used in strip mining coal. Soviet coal industry commentators were aware that this put them at a big disadvantage compared to other countries where a much greater range of shovels were available (e.g., see Kuznetsov, 1971, p. 279).

Experience with producing larger shovels has been much less impressive, either in terms of getting models produced or ensuring that they justify themselves in operation. The next increase in size involved one model with a 12.5-meter bucket and another with a 15-meter bucket. In 1967 the Council of Ministers passed a special decree to encourage development of the Kuzbass coal fields, for which it was decided larger shovels were needed (“O merakh neotlozhnoi pomoshchi po dal’neishemu razvitii ugol’noi promyshlennosti Kuznetskogo bassenia” in Resheniia Partii i pravitel’stva po khoziaistvennym voprosam, vol. 6, pp. 393–401). The decree called for production of three prototypes of the EKG-12.5 by the Izhorsk plant, though apparently in the end only one prototype was produced. The decree envisaged series production of this model by 1969, but series production did not actually begin until about 1975. For this model, therefore, there was a five-year slip-page in the production time table. Design work on a 15-meter shovel, the EGL-15, began as early as 1948, the decision to produce a prototype was taken in 1949, and it is claimed that a prototype was produced in 1950 (ANSSSR, 1968, p. 105). But another source says the first of these shovels began to work only in 1958 (Ugol’, 1960:3, p. 8). There were only three in operation at the end of 1970, which suggests that nothing more than prototypes were ever produced (Zhuravlev, 1971, p. 7). The design of this shovel must have been unsatisfactory in some way. Minugol’ decided to stop using the one they had at Cheremkhovo, though it is not explained what was wrong with it (Ministerstvo ugol’noi promyshlennosti, 1969, p. 40). Mel’nikov, in describing the tipazh for shovels as envisaged for the foreseeable future did not include a 15-meter shovel (Planovoe khoziaistvo, 1974:8, p. 80).

The largest mechanical shovel attempted so far is a 35-cubic meter shovel, originally intended to be produced in 1959 (Zasiadko, 1959, pp. 267–268). A prototype was developed in 1960, which was put to work in 1965 (ANSSSR, 1968, p. 108) at Cheremkhovo in the Irkutsk basin. It must not have worked very well, and apparently underwent a long series of trials and modifications. A statement in 1964 indicated that series production would begin in 1966 (Ugol’, 1964:11, p. 74). This goal was not met, and it was finally retargeted for series production sometime in 1971–1975. So in this case the slippage was something like 10 years.

Excavating shovels can be made very large. There is a 138-cubic meter machine in use in the United States (Mining Engineering, October, 1974, p. 4), and Soviet planners have long talked about much larger shovels. For example, it is thought that a 100-cubic meter shovel would be appropriate for overburden removal at some of the Kansk-Achinsk mines (Ugol’, 1967:4, p. 43). The Novo-Kramatorsk plant was said in 1967 to have started design of an EVG-100/70 (Ugol’, 1967:11, p. 21) and Mel’nikov includes it in the tipazh of overburden strippers still intended for development (Planovoe khoziaistvo, 1974: 10, p. 80). There is a controversy as to the desirability of so large a shovel. One Soviet engineer surveying the history of excavators says that experience has shown that for stripping work the advantage is clearly with draglines and that it would be a mistake to spend resources on developing a new series of large shovels (Ugol’, 1970:8, pp. 47–49).

The story of dragline excavators of the walking type is also one of slow upward movement to larger models, with many delays and setbacks along the way. Soviet production started with the ESh-1 model, which has a 3.4-meter bucket and a 38-meter boom. It is interesting that the initiative for the development of this excavator was taken by the coal industry—the prototypes were developed in repair plants under the control of the coal industry rather than in heavy-machinery plants. Production of the industrial version, however, was handled by the Novo-Kramatorsk plant in 1949–1952 (Dombrovskii, 1969, p. 59). During 1952–1957 it was replaced with the ESh-4/40 produced at the Novo-Kramatorsk plant, one of the two plants that have produced almost all excavators.* This excavator underwent various modifications to 5/40 and 5/45 versions, which utilized more fully the capacity of the basic design.

The same plant also produced another family of models designated as the 6/60, 6/80, and 8/60 (Ugol’, 1967:11, pp. 20–21).† The first of these machines began work in 1959, and series production began in 1961 (ANSSSR, 1968, p. 106). A still later generation, consisting of the 10/60 and 10/70, was reported as undergoing industrial testing in 1964 (Ugol’, 1964:11, p. 74), though other sources suggest testing did not take place until 1965 or 1966 (Ugol’, 1967:4, pp. 43–44). Actual production of the 10/70, however, was assigned to Uralmashzavod (the other plant capable of producing excavators) along with a couple of modifications—10/75A and 13/50. The lot of the 13/50 for industrial testing (opytno-promyshlennaia partiia) was to be produced in the first half of 1967, but so far as I can tell it was never actually produced (see Zhuravlev, 1971, p. 7). This is in spite of the fact that it was thought about 35 or 40 would be needed, and that it would be put in series production in 1969–1970 (Ugol’, 1967:4, pp. 44, 48). I have been unable to find an explanation of what went wrong on that model.

Uralmashzavod also developed a succession of models in its own R and D institutes. The first of these was the 14/65 family, on which design work started in 1948 and which was produced in 20 units during the years 1949–1957 (Rosenfel’d, 1961, p. 43). The initial model was produced in record time, probably because of the high priority of the Volga-Don Canal for which it was originally intended. Subcontracting was an important element in the achievement, and as an interesting parallel to what we have described as happening in the electric power equipment case, it is said that many of the elements were produced and delivered before the final design was settled (ANSSSR, 1968, p. 100). The prototype that went to work on the Volga-Don Canal in 1950 was a 14/65 version; the series version produced from 1952 on was a 14/75 model (Bol’shaia Sovetskaia Entsiklopediia, 2nd ed., vol. 48, p. 405; and Dombrovskii, 1969, pp. 60–61). This excavator was redesigned and modernized in 1957 to become essentially a new model, the 15/90 excavator. The first of these was tested in 1959 (ANSSSR, 1968, p. 108). A 20/65 version, only one of which was ever produced (Ugol’, 1967:4, p. 43), was a modification that sacrificed boom length to allow a bigger bucket. All of these larger excavators turned out by Uralmashzavod were produced in rather small numbers; there were only 45 of them in operation as of the end of 1970 (Zhuravlev, 1971, p. 7).

A significant step upward at Uralmashzavod was to a 25/100 model. It is claimed that a 25-meter model was “prepared” in 1957 (Rosenfel’d, 1961, p. 443), and a 1964 source says that an experimental model “has been accepted” by a State Commission (Ugol’, 1964:11, p. 74). Since the 1967 decree for the development of the Kuzbass mentioned above stipulated that two 25/100 “prototypes” would be produced for testing, one in 1969, and one in 1970, the earlier effort must have been very tentative. Apparently one prototype was actually produced in response to the 1967 decree and was in operation by 1970 (Zhuravlev, 1971, p. 7). I have seen no figures as to how many of these machines were then produced during the 9th Five Year Plan, but apparently not many. Mention is made of the project at Uralmashzavod to build a 50-cubic meter walking excavator (Rosenfel’d, 1961, p. 447), but nothing ever came of this.

Finally, the biggest dragline the Russians have so far attempted is the ESh-100/100. These very large excavators are intended for work in the new mines to be constructed in the Kansk-Achinsk basin. This excavator was originally intended to be a 80/100 model, and the tekhnicheskii proekt* for this excavator was said in one source to have been completed in 1967 (Ugol’, 1967:1, p. 3) and in another source, in 1964 (ANSSSR, 1968, p. 60). According to the 9th Five Year Plan, a prototype was to be in operation and series production to be organized by the end of the period—i.e., by 1975. For some reason this design was modified to carry a 100-cubic meter bucket instead of the original 80-cubic meter bucket, and a prototype had been assembled and moved to the work area in the Nazarovo mine in the Kansk-Achinsk basin early in 1977 (Ugol’, 1978:1, p. 27).

I am in no position to evaluate the technical qualities of these excavators nor have I been able to find an evaluation by any Western expert. N. G. Dombrovskii, the principal Soviet authority on excavators, says that the Soviet models compare very favorably with foreign products, though in the early years they were excessively heavy. He also claims that some of their design features are original and advantageous, mentioning especially the trussed-mast boom, and the hydraulic walking mechanism (Dombrovskii, 1969, pp. 60–61). Not all experts agree, however, and one spokesman for the Soviet coal industry criticizes both these features specifically (Ugol’, 1964:10). But the most important conclusion to be drawn from this development history is that, although in the early postwar years Soviet excavators seem to have matched U.S. machines in size, the industry subsequently has lagged seriously in developing satisfactory models of larger sizes.

Finally, the Russians have long been interested in large capacity bucket-wheel excavators. As of 1975 they had 30 or so at work in various mines. The longest experience seems to be in the Dnepr mines, where soft overburden, lignite, and relatively mild weather create good conditions for use of such excavators. But the excavators so far developed have inadequate force on the cutting edge of the bucket to permit their use either for overburden or coal in most mines without blasting. Also, they do not work properly in winter because the frozen ground is too hard to cut and because the conveyors that are part of the system break down. The planners, however, would like to employ bucket-wheel excavators in those other situations and have been experimenting for a long time.

In the development of wheel excavators, again the initiative came from the coal industry to the extent that the first one was an essentially homemade model produced at Ekibastuz in the mid-sixties, by modifying an EKG-4.6 shovel. In 1963 the Donetsk plant imeni LSKM created a relatively small prototype, the ERG-350, which was put into experimental operation at the Irsha-Borodinsk mine in East Siberia. On the basis of the results of testing this prototype, a modification, the ERG-400-D, with a capacity of 1,000 tons per hour was prepared in 1966 to be used in the Ekibastuz mine, and it was in experimental operation by September 1966. The tests revealed that it lacked sufficient biting force to break up the coal without blasting, it did not work well in cold weather, and its motors lacked adequate capacity. Many modifications were made in the testing process, and after a year’s experimental operation it was accepted in September 1967 by a state commission and recommended for series production. Out of these experiments there also arose plans for a new model, ERP-1250, with a capacity of 1250 cubic meters per hour, and this is the kind of machine most widely used.

At some point the Russians became interested in the bucket-wheel excavators used in the East German open-pit lignite mines. One of these with a capacity of 1,000 tons per hour (the Sr_s K-470 model) was installed at Ekibastuz in 1969 and was in operation in 1970–1971. At some time also the Germans supplied an SR_s K-2000 machine with a capacity of 3,000 tons per hour. This is one of the few cases of technological transfer in the coal industry and one of the few cases from Eastern Europe in any energy sector.

But the Russians apparently intended to use these German machines only as models to be copied and have gone on to produce domestic models with capacities of 3,000 and 5,000 tons per hour. The Novo-Kramatorsk plant was supposed to produce a larger model, the ERG-1600, with an hourly capacity of 3,000 cubic meters per hour (ANSSSR, 1968, p. 62), and according to Zhuravlev (1971, p. 8), there was one such machine working in 1970. I believe an accurate statement of the situation is that bucket-wheel excavators have become fairly important in coal extraction but still have not been effectively mastered for the removal of overburden.

Trucks

Soviet decision makers in open-pit mining have generally underrated the potential of trucks, and there is a kind of tacit assumption that, when the transport method of removing overburden is used, the work will be done by railroad. It is instructive, for instance, that the 1967 decree mentioned earlier on strengthening the equipment base for strip mining concerned itself with every other kind of equipment including locomotives and dumpcars, but did not mention trucks. Given rail transport for overburden, it often follows naturally that coal will also be moved by rail, especially since much steam coal is not treated and is shipped directly to users in cars loaded directly in the mine. This method is used at Ekibastuz, for example. The emphasis on rail transport grew in part out of the fact that for a long time there were no high-capacity trucks that the mine designers could build into a system. A need for such trucks was recognized early, but the R and D effort to develop them has been unsuccessful. The commitment to rail seems all the more dubious when it is realized that for a long time the technological level of mine railroad transport was relatively low. Until the sixties, coal mine haulage used steam engines almost exclusively, and only in the 9th Five Year Plan did a fairly decisive shift to electric and diesel traction take place. Most Soviet dumpcars until the 9th Five Year Plan period had capacities smaller than the trucks used in big U.S. mines.

Nor is this interpretation merely the projection of an outsider. More recently a much greater appreciation of the potential of trucks has arisen in the USSR, especially for the flexibility they permit in mine operation. As one Soviet writer says, “without setting ourselves the goal of critiquing the decisions of projectmakers [to use rail transport] . . . it can be affirmed with certainty that in many cases these decisions do not meet the sharply rising economic demands” ( Ugol’, 1971:1 p. 40)·

For a long time only relatively small trucks were available to the industry. The model most widely used was the 25-ton MAZ-525, produced in the Minsk automobile factory beginning in the fifties. The MAZ-525 was supplemented by the smaller IaKZ-210-E dump trucks produced by the Iaroslav plant with a 10-ton capacity and the KrAz-256 with a capacity of 10—12 tons, which was apparently produced from the early sixties (Ugol’, 1967:11, p. 24).

These models were modified somewhat over the years, sometimes by fitting a larger bed to fully utilize the truck’s capacity when material of lower density was hauled. For example, the MAZ-525 was modified into a new model called the MAZ-530, which had a 30-ton capacity. Later, apparently this same truck was fitted with a larger engine and was produced in a version with tandem rear axles that gave it a capacity of 40 tons. An important limitation on all these trucks was that they were basically general-purpose dump trucks intended for use in heavy construction; their structural strength and power were not optimized for the condition of strip mining. Coal is less dense than many other cargoes so that truck capacity is underutilized with coal, and too much of the work goes into hauling the weight of the truck itself (Ugol’, 1972:3, p. 30).

Primary responsibility for designing and producing heavy trucks for open-pit mining has rested with the BelAZ plant in Zhodino, Belorussia. The BelAZ designers, together with the coal industry institutes, worked out a tipazh of trucks that was supposed to provide something suitable for every situation. It envisaged a series of models up to 180 tons in capacity, with various kinds of transmissions, dumping systems, and wheel arrangements (Ugol’, 1972:3, pp. 30–34). Other sources speak of plans for 300 and 500 ton vehicles as well. (The notion of a tipazh is fundamental in Soviet R and D practice and more will be said about it below.) The smallest of the basic models in the BelAZ tipazh, and still the most widely used, is the BelAZ-540, a 27-ton dump truck produced also in a large-body version to haul less dense material. The BelAZ-540 was first produced in 1961 (Ugol’, 1963:2, p. 21) and was put into series production in 1967 (Kuznetsov, 1971, p. 294).

Progress in producing models larger than 27 tons has been extremely slow. A 40-ton truck had been a high priority of the mines for a long time. A review of technical needs made at the beginning of the Seven Year Plan (i.e., in 1959) said such a truck was an urgent necessity (Zasiadko, 1959, p. 276). A prototype of the 40-ton version of the BelAZ-548 was built in 1962 (Ugol’, 1963:2, p. 21). This model seems to have been produced in small numbers by 1970, and began to be used in coal mines during the 9th Five Year Plan. Thus the delay between the articulation of the need and actual availability in this case was 10 to 15 years.

The mining industry has been eagerly awaiting long-promised models with capacities of 65 and 120 tons. The timing is not very clear, but already in 1960 the coal industry was counting on using the 65-ton truck. A prototype was produced quite early—there is a picture of a prototype in a 1968 book (Mel’nikov, 1968, p. 180). Presumably this truck was tested and accepted, since, according to an article in Ugol’ (1976:2, p. 7), preparations were made during the 9th Five Year Plan (1971–1975) to begin series production of it. But progress was obviously not very rapid, since a deputy minister of the coal industry says in 1976 only that the process of mastering series production (osvoenie seriinogo proizvodstva) of the 65-ton model has been started (Ugol’, 1976:2, p. 7). Soviet statements compound several terms for beginning in a way that makes it uncertain whether they have actually begun any activity, and through 1978 I have not seen any statement that this model is actually being produced in series.

The guidelines for the 10th Five Year Plan specifically mention starting production of 75-ton and 120-ton haulage vehicles. A model described as the BelAZ-549, with a capacity of 75 tons, is pictured in a 1976 newspaper article and is described as “the firstborn of an industrial lot” (promyshlennaia partiia). This formulation suggests that this model has already been tested and is in production, and a coal industry source corroborates that the industry began to receive these vehicles in 1977 (Ugol’, 1978:2, p. 37).

A prototype of the 120-ton model is supposed to have undergone industrial testing as early as 1972 (Mel’nikov, 1972, p. 85). The 9th Five Year Plan specified that it was to be “mastered” during the plan period—i.e., “industrial production” was supposed to have been achieved by 1975 (Baibakov, 1972, p. 130). Obviously it was not, since that goal has been restated for the 10th Five Year Plan in the Guidelines for that plan. As late as 1978 it is still described as undergoing testing (Ugol’, 1978:2, p. 37). This is the first model to be based on electric motors on individual wheels; all the earlier models have used hydraulic transmissions.

Another idea which was highly touted at one point but which has not yet reached successful development is the trolleivoz, a concept for a vehicle with a diesel engine generating electricity to be used by motors on the wheels but also equipped with apparatus for drawing power from a network. For movement on its regular route over heavy grades out of deep pits, the vehicle would draw power from a contact net, but its independent power source would permit it to maneuver on its own in the mining areas. This approach would also economize on energy input through use of regenerative braking as the empty vehicle returned to the lower levels. The BelAZ plant was supposed to produce this 65-ton capacity vehicle in 1967, and an experimental batch was supposed to be produced in 1968, to be tested at mines. Not much progress has been made on this idea; a 1971 source said that there had still not been industrial testing of a prototype (Loginov, 1971, pp. 198–199), but it may not yet have been abandoned—Loginov says that it holds great promise for the future.

In any case, as of the mid-seventies the largest vehicle the mining industry had been able to obtain had a capacity of only 40 tons. This seems to be an example of the situation common in Soviet industry, in which the designers and producers charged with the production of new equipment simply can’t deliver it, even though it is not really radical or especially demanding in its technology. Moreover, foreign models have demonstrated the feasibility of all the basic technical features. According to Bituminous Coal Facts (1972), the U.S. industry uses vehicles with capacities of 150 tons, and apparently some 220 ton vehicles were also in use by the mid-seventies. The time it takes from the first design effort to a commercially producible and usable product is extremely long. The general interpretation for this kind of innovational failure in the Soviet economy (and it occurs frequently) emphasizes such problems as inability to get crucial inputs or failure of the responsible organization to support the project in a crunch when it competes with other objectives. Another common element in many of the explanations is that the Soviet system has all the pieces but just can’t fit them all together. Most commentators have been inclined to think that Soviet design organizations are competent and employ well-trained and talented personnel. I am beginning to think, however, that there may be something wrong in that area as well—i.e., the designers too often produce a design that they ought to know can’t be produced or won’t work under the conditions to which it will be subjected.

The delay in increasing vehicle size and the fact that there are no really large vehicles means a serious disproportion in size between excavators and trucks. The 27-ton truck is not big enough for use with the EKG-8 excavator, which as explained earlier is the main excavator currently in use for removing coal. There is apparently a rule of thumb that a truck should be loaded with three or four excavator bucketfuls. When trucks are too small, the capacity of the excavators is not fully realized, and when the excavators are too small, the trucks spend too much time waiting instead of hauling. The existence of this disproportion is a commonplace in the Soviet literature, and the coal industry experts are unhappy about it (see especially Ugol’, 1965:11, p. 28; and Ugol’, 1972:3, p. 30).

Rail Transport Equipment

Rail transport remains the most important method of hauling overburden to the spoil dump—in 1970, trucks hauled only a sixth of the overburden moved by the transport method (Zhuravlev, 1971, p. 10), and the share could not have risen much since. Technological progress in this area is again mostly a function of increases in size of equipment and of a change from steam traction to diesel and electric traction. The main features of Soviet technological history here are the relatively late shift from steam locomotives and a fairly steady upward creep in the size and productivity of the train units. There were some electric locomotives already at the beginning of the fifties, but as late as the end of the decade, steam traction still accounted for over 60 percent of the rail transport work (Zasiadko, 1959, p. 276). Proportions began to shift rapidly in the sixties, and by 1966 the share of electric traction was 60 percent (Ugol’, 1967:8, p. 55); it must be much higher now. The power of locomotives has gone from a tractive effort of about 80 tons in the fifties to 240 tons in the new diesel units that began to be introduced in the seventies. Dumpcars were mostly of 40–60 tons capacity in the fifties, but by the mid-seventies about half of them were in the class of 100–105 tons (ugol’, 1976:2, p. 37). With this larger capacity equipment, train productivities doubled between the fifties and the seventies (Mel’nikov, 1957, p. 27; and N. P. Zhuravlev, 1971, p. 9). The contrast between this picture of success in getting larger rail equipment and the delays in raising capacities of other types of equipment may be explained partly in terms of help from the Eastern Europeans. The larger dumpcars are imported from Poland and Czechoslovakia, as well as being domestically produced, and one of the larger locomotive units used in open-pit mining (which combines an electric control locomotive with a diesel unit permitting operation away from a power supply) was developed in East Germany (ANSSSR, 1968, pp. 42–43).

Auxiliary Equipment

The technological level of strip mining is decisively affected by the excavating and haulage equipment discussed so far, but a variety of auxiliary equipment is also important. Several Soviet commentators note that Soviet strip mining uses relatively few bulldozers, scrapers, or wheeled loaders, though these are common in the U.S. industry (cf. Table 4-2). The problem again is that the equipment-producing industries will not supply the kind of equipment suited to strip mining. Major complaints are that the available bulldozers are insufficiently powerful to meet the demands of strip mining and that engines and tracks break down. The most powerful dozer is that based on the DET-250 tractor, with a 300 HP engine, while elsewhere in the world capacities up to 500 HP are available (Loginov, 1971, p. 149—actually, Caterpillar advertises a 700-HP dozer in Soviet journals).

Another auxiliary process that has been neglected is auger extraction. The usual role for augers in connection with strip mining is to clean out exposed seams on the fringes of an excavation where the overburden has become too thick to remove economically (Carroll Christenson, op. cit.). The 8th Five Year Plan (1966–1970) envisaged series production of augurs (ANSSSR, 1968, p. 40), but apparently nothing beyond very preliminary work was attempted. According to Mel’nikov, “thus far we have not given the requisite attention to auger mining of coal, and have so far done only some experimental work in the Kuzbass” (Ugol’, 1971:8, p. 43). Little progress was made in the 9th Five Year Plan (1971–1975), since five years later the only novel thing he has to report is that a prototype auger produced by the Donetsk plant was given industrial trials in 1975 (Ugol’, 1976:2, p. 38).

About 85 percent of all overburden removed in Soviet strip mines must be blasted before excavation (Mel’nikov, 1972); drilling equipment therefore has an important effect on productivity. The drilling of the holes for these charges is a labor-intensive job that takes about 12–13 percent of all Soviet labor in strip mining (Dobva, 1973, p. 143). Technical progress in this area has involved going from percussion drilling to rotary drilling, and, within the latter, from scraper bits to roller bits and combined scraper and roller bits. Accompanying this change is a shift to larger diameter holes and greater flexibility in the angle at which the holes are drilled. These changes in turn make for more effective blasting, in some cases moving a good part of the blasted rock all the way to the dumping area. In general outline, the Soviet adoption of these innovations has been as follows:

Improvements in drilling blast holes for strip mining came rather late—the Russians were slow to move away from cable-tool percussion drilling. They even did a lot of hand drilling until the fifties, and the share of cable-tool percussion drilling stayed at a fifth to a fourth up to the middle of the sixties. A commentator at the beginning of the seventies pinpointed drilling as a weak element because of dependence on obsolete cable-tool drills. This required a lot of heavy physical labor, the quality of the driving steel was bad, and reliability was poor so that the equipment was idle a great deal of the time (V. P. Loginov, 1971, pp. 138–139). Things began to change in the second half of the sixties, when decent models of rotary drills began to be produced. The shift to these more productive models came in the 9th Five Year Plan period (Ugol’, 1974:11), though by 1975 these machines still constituted only about a third of the stock (Ugol’, 1976:2, p. 35).

There is quite a bit of information on the development histories of the various models of drills, and one of the interesting aspects of the development process is that there seems to have been some elements of design competition between different design institutions, each working with its own experimental plant. Rather than going through these details, however, I simply offer my general conclusion that the situation with these drills must have been much like that with the other equipment. The industry knew what it needed just by following U.S. experience, and the research institutes designed the corresponding models. The new designs did not get turned into prototypes very fast and, when they did, contained defects. When these were ironed out and the machines put into production, they were still not produced quickly enough, and so at any given time the industry has been burdened with a great deal of obsolete equipment.

CONCLUSIONS

One clear and consistent theme has run through this chapter—the difficulty experienced by the coal industry in getting the equipment that it needs to meet its goals of modernization and productivity growth. The kind of explanation suggested has in general been consistent with what the general literature on innovation in the Soviet economy has to say. The Soviet economy is a seller’s market; lateral communications for making the consumer’s wishes known and giving them leverage are weak; the incentive system that guides the producers of equipment inhibits their interest in producing new models. The explanation usually runs in terms of the behavior of the production enterprise, but the coal industry example adds the useful reminder that the lack of responsiveness may involve higher levels as well. Important in the charge against the sector producing coal mining machinery is that it has failed to add the capacity to produce the new designs. This is a decision made at the ministerial level, where the pressure of other demands has led the decision makers to use the capital investment resources intended for this purpose in other directions. On each of the occasions when the Council of Ministers has taken up the issue of how to get the coal industry reequipped, its decrees have made a special point of directing Mintiazhmash to increase the capacities of the coal machinery plants or to “realize” fully the investments earmarked for that purpose. (See, for instance, the 1968 decree on the technical reequipping of the coal industry in Resheniia partii i pravitel’stva po khoziaistvennym voprosam, vol. 7, pp. 64–73; and the similar decree of 1973, in volume 9 of the same source, pp. 485–490). Similarly, in excavator production, the ministry seems to feel stronger pressures to fulfill other parts of its production program than to produce the needed excavators. The plants producing excavators are primarily concerned with producing steel mill equipment—it is the ability of these plants to produce very large metal parts that fits them for the production of excavators. But excavators are only a minor sideline in their total product mix. Moreover, parts of the excavator projects are farmed out to a lot of other plants, for which, again, this activity is only a sideline (Loginov, 1971). There is a difference here from the situation in electric power—the plants serving coal mining typically produce for a variety of customers and so are in a better position to behave as if they were in a seller’s market.

Clearly evident in the coal mining machinery industry are the familiar environmental conditions that make enterprises reluctant to innovate, especially the difficulty of getting components and materials. The problems with chains for conveyors was mentioned earlier, and there was a similar problem with material for conveyor belts. It seems that steel quality has been one of the major problems constraining design and production of better excavators. One source says that dragline excavators cannot be improved until steel with higher yield strength is available to the producers. Whereas the steel most commonly used in American excavators is said to have a yield strength of 70 kg/mm² down to temperatures of — 50°C, Soviet excavator producers must use steel with a yield strength of 40 kg/mm² down to — 40°C ( Ugol’, 1974: 3, p. 30). Another author says that if better steel were available it would be possible to reduce the weight of the boom and make it possible to carry a larger dipper (Ugol’, 1976:2, p. 42).

Beyond this confirmation of generally accepted interpretations, however, the coal industry also offers some insights to this producer-customer interaction at the R and D stages that precede actual production, and I would like to conclude with some discussion of this question. This interaction can be broken down into two stages: the specification of a range of different models in some area (i.e., the tipazh mentioned earlier) and the process of design within the specifications of this tipazh.

The tipazh approach seems to be a distinctive feature of the Soviet system. The objective is to develop a catalog of all possible applications of some kind of equipment and then establish specifications for a set of models that is to cover these needs. An analogous phenomenon is very common in the market economy, though it is more likely to be a creation of either the buyer (as in military procurement) or the seller, rather than something agreed on jointly by all buyers and sellers. This stage would seem to be a quintessentially cooperative job that must absorb the perspectives both of the producers and the users of the equipment. One might think that the buyer is in the best position to specify what is needed, but it is probably more realistic to assume that the user will often be somewhat conservative and may need some stimulation from the production side. It is sometimes claimed for example, with respect to a U.S. analogue, that the military has a dangerous tendency to overspecify what it wants and is better off when considerable latitude is left to the production side to use its R and D capability to generate better possibilities. The production side should in any case be allowed a considerable input so that the specifications reflect its intimate awareness of what is possible in terms of producibility, though, of course, it too can be technically conservative and may need to have its imagination stretched.

I believe that for many kinds of coal machinery the initiative in setting specifications is to a large extent in the hands of the coal industry. The sources seem generally to indicate that the initiative in setting up the tipazh for excavators has been the responsibility of Giprotsentroshakht, though this job also involves the cooperation of customers using open-pit methods in other kinds of mining as well (ANSSSR, 1968, p. 57). I believe, however, that the producers have had some influence on this tipazh. I suspect the producers have a lot to say regarding what is feasible, and they always have a strong interest in ensuring a high degree of commonality in parts and subassemblies. The excavator producers have big KBs that do technical economic studies that we can find in the literature, and we have a considerable volume of writings from chief designers and other people on the industry side about their input into this process. Moreover, certain characteristic basic design traditions exhibited in the excavator models all along seem to reflect considerations imposed by the production side—e.g., the relatively small bucket size for any given boom length mentioned earlier.

There is also a tipazh for trucks, and there are more indications that in this case the coal industry has had inadequate input. Most discussions speak of the tipazh as the creation of the BelAZ designers, but more telling are some complaints on the part of coal industry spokesmen that it does not reflect coal industry needs. One author says that the BelAZ models are deliberately patterned after American equipment and that this is inappropriate since Soviet open-pit mines tend to work deeper horizons than American mines. The greater depth of working in Soviet mines means a need for more climbing and hence a higher power/weight ratio than is characteristic of American equipment (Vilenskii, 1962).

For underground equipment, the literature does not speak of an explicit tipazh, and the definition of needs and setting of specifications is more likely to be done in terms of individual machines. For underground mining, the comprehensive view would in any case seem to need to be oriented more to the problem of compatibility among different kinds of machines, rather than compatibility among different models of a given kind of machine. In the development process for coal mining machinery there is excessive concentration on central items of equipment, with inadequate attention given to balanced and integrated R and D work on all the elements (similar to the problem noted in Chapter 3 for the electric power industry). One critic says that in underground mining the development of equipment is carried out piecemeal; not enough consideration is directed to where labor can be saved in the whole cycle (Ugol’, 1976:11, p. 60). We have already noted the dominant focus on excavators in open-pit mining, with too little attention given to equipment for such auxiliary processes as road building, cleaning up, and leveling.

Specifications for equipment, whether individually or in the form of some sort of overall tipazh, are still very general, and what kind of equipment is actually developed will be determined at the actual design stage. The same basic interactive, cooperative desideratum is important at this level. Here we are getting closer to themes that are well developed in the general literature on Soviet R and D, but the coal industry suggests a couple of new twists.

First, much depends on who controls the R and D institutes, and the conditions of production may not leave a great deal of room for choice in this respect. In the case of excavators and trucks, the KBs are closely identified with the production side. As mentioned earlier, the first Soviet walking dragline was produced by a plant in the coal industry itself, as was the first bucket-wheel excavator. But, for such complex and heavy machinery, serious design and prototype production has to be done by the producers. The production of excavators has been concentrated in four large heavy-machine-building plants, and each of these has a large KB for excavator design. In the 1962 decree on improving open-pit mining, one of the measures taken was to greatly enlarge and strengthen these KBs (“O merakh po dal’neishomu razvitiiu i sovershenstvovaniiu dobychi poleznykh iskopaemykh otkrytym sposobom,” Resheniia Partii i pravitel’stva po khoziaistvennym voprosam, vol. 5, Moscow, 1968). Under these conditions, no matter what the specifications say, the designs produced are likely to be dominated by producer considerations rather than by user needs. The Soviet economy seems to inspire two kinds of biases here. First, the producers seem to have a great interest in commonality of parts between successive generations, different sizes, and model variations. Adherence to this principle is very explicitly laid out both for excavators (as in books like Dombrovskii, 1969) and for trucks (Dronov and Shatokhinaia, 1970, pp. 91–98). This principle seems almost certain to inhibit adequate adaptation to different conditions and to account for things like the small intermodel steps in expanding excavator capacity.*

Furthermore, there is a great tendency toward concentration on the production side, limiting the possibility that different producers will come up with different design ideas. There are only four plants that have played any significant role in producing large excavators, and in the Soviet system even these four do not really have design independence. As mentioned earlier, one of the families of excavators developed at the Kramatorsk plant was assigned to Uralmashzavod for production. For underground mining machinery, there seems to be a little more diversity based on the distinction between regional basins. It should be remembered that, in the shift to narrow-web combines and to complexes, the Moscow basin group of institutes and producers were the first to take this direction, and in doing so, provided an alternative to contrary views in the Donbass group.

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* The Russians sometimes report a figure for net output (i.e., after cleaning), but even that measure needs to be further adjusted downward for the fact that some raw coal is cleaned by the Ministry of Ferrous Metallurgy rather than the Ministry of the Coal Industry and that over half of all coal is shipped to customers, especially to electric power stations, without cleaning. Also, much of what is counted as clean coal (middlings, slurry, screenings) contains a large amount of rock.

*CIA, 1976; Tremi and Gallik, 1973. The latter source suggests a ruble/dollar ratio for machinery in the range 0.5–0.7.

*Another distinctive feature of the technological decision-making process is that the equipment used tends to be produced in relatively small numbers. Differential design to meet the needs of a particular situation and the fact that each of these units of equipment is an item of very high productivity mean that the numbers of units of any particular model that is produced will be relatively small. We may be talking in terms of a few hundred trucks, with excavators and draglines in the tens. In the case of bucket-wheel excavators, each machine may be essentially unique. More will be said later about Soviet efforts to achieve economies and to meet performance specifications by setting up a tipazh that envisages both differentiation to cover all situations and design commonality that simplifies design and production efforts.

*Mel’nikov, incidentally, is probably the most noted Soviet authority on strip mining. He is an Academician but has also had executive responsibility in the coal-mining industry.

†In these designations, E stands for excavator, K indicates shovels intended for removing the mineral, V for removing overburden. G indicates mounting on caterpillar tracks. The number indicates bucket size in cubic meters, and when a second number follows a hyphen, it indicates boom length.

*In these model designations, ESh stands for walking excavator (ekskavator shagaiushchii), and the two numbers show the size of the bucket in cubic meters (before the slash) and the length of the boom in meters.

†A basic feature of dragline design is a trade-off between bucket size and boom length. The longer the boom, the smaller the weight that can be worked at the end of it. Shortening the boom permits the exacavator to be fitted with a larger bucket. The principle of producing several modifications of a given machine on this basis has been followed in Soviet excavator production. According to N. N. Mel’nikov, the tipazh of excavators worked out by Tsentrogiproshakht envisaged two such modifications for each basic model (Ugol', 1967:4, p. 43). Mel’nikov also gives a somewhat different version of the optimal tipazh, in which only some of the draglines have more than one alternative version (Planovoe khoziaistvo, 1974:8, p. 80). There seems to be a dispute on the optimal combination of boom length and bucket size. Apparently Soviet design has preferred long booms. The biggest excavator has an 8o-meter bucket on a 150-meter boom, whereas the biggest U.S. excavator has a 168-meter bucket on a 94-meter boom (Bituminous Coal Facts, 1972). Some Soviet authors characterize the U.S. trend as “progressive” and one that the USSR should follow. One possible interpretation is that the length is set by the minimum needed to cut a wide swath and that the designers have then had to be content with a small bucket because relatively low-strength steel for the boom limits the weight that can be handled (see Mel’nikov in Ugol’, 1976:2, p. 42 and Loginov, 1971, pp. 190–191; for more on steel, see below).

*Soviet design procedure usually goes through three stages of increasing detail and seriousness. The first is the avanproekt, followed by an eskiznyi proekt, and then tekhnicheskii proekt, which is the actual engineering design.

*A detailed study of Soviet locomotive design strongly suggested that this design principle was a considerable inhibition to progress (William Boncher, “Innovation and Technical Adaptation in the Russian Economy: The Growth in Unit Power of the Russian Mainline Freight Locomotive," Ph.D. Dissertation, Indiana University, 1976.