How long does it take to move a mountain? About 3 weeks judging by the rate at which the electric shovel at Xikeng was eating through the huge pile of coal next to the track.
Every 40 minutes or so another few hundred tons of the black stuff would be shovelled into a waiting train and carried off, providing almost half the traffic we saw in the opencast mine. Very little new coal was added to the pile and it was unclear what would happen once it had all gone.
JS 8197 eased forwards as the shovel loaded its train at Xikeng on 26 November 2016.