A local company called Leightons had a fleet of 631 open bowl scrapers carrying out large-scale overburden removal from open-pit gold mines in the W.A. Goldfields in the mid-to-late 1980's.
I can recall watching this fleet at work stripping the overburden on the Paddington Gold Mine, near Broad Arrow, W.A., around about 1985.
There were about 20 x 631's in Leightons fleet, and the guy running the fleet was a real gun on scraper fleet operation.
He would stand on the jobsite and watch all the operators to ensure maximum production with minimum machine abuse.
He would be watching for excessive wheelspin and ensuring the pusher dozer operators were working with care and skill.
Unfortunately I either got no photos of this operation, or they've been lost somewhere. It was an impressive dirt-shifting operation to watch.
This the Paddington Mine and nearby mines in recent times.
Leightons earthmoving operations were exceptionally well run, and they ran their equipment almost non-stop. I often saw Leighton machines with 10,000 hrs on the clock, after just 2 or 2-1/2 years from new.
I would often buy ex-Leighton machines after they were traded in on new ones, because they had such a good maintenance regime and records of maintenance, and Leightons didn't spare the money when it came to repairs.
If an engine was getting tired, the machine would get a complete brand new or fully reconditioned engine installed. The same for other major components. They kept their machines in excellent condition.
Leightons apparently had an excellent maintenance funding arrangement, in that they kept a maintenance fund running for each machine from new.
As the machine clocked up hours, they would top up the maintenance fund for the machine with X amount of dollars for each hour operated.
So when a major component was required to be replaced, the funds were there to do it.
They had the running costs of each type of machine well-tuned, and if a machine was burning up more money than the maintenance fund contained, it would be sold off as uneconomic to operate.