I live a couple miles down from a limestone quarry, and have family and friends in the coal mining industry. It probably explains why there are so many in my collection.

I picked one of these up at Tractor Supply. The weight of this casting, and its detail are what drew me to it, and continue to impress me.Definitely puts the MBX Faun I owned several of as a kid to shame. Especially in that by the mid 2000s, the casting had been retooled to have a plastic dump, while the Tomica's only plastic bits are minimal.

Box lists it at 1/185, so just under N scale. I've been wanting to pick up the EX8000 shovel to go with it, but it's not scaled properly--it's an even tinier 1:300. The Hitachi loader Tomica also has is 1:110, so too big. Majorette has a Volvo loader that, without doing the math, looks to be around N scale, so it may be a good match. Then, despite being generic, there's always the MBX Quarry King.

I picked up a Joal Michigan L320 about a year ago--a loader still found in many coal operations and quarries. It's 1:50 scale, but still just short of a foot long and over two pounds. Been meaning on getting their "Euc" to go alongside it.

While I no longer collect pieces like these, the large quarry/mining trucks fascinate me. We have a number of open pit coal mines about 60 miles north of me that I drive by on a fairly regular basis and always enjoy seeing these large mining trucks and the big shovels in operation.

I bought my copy at my local Rural King when it was new. It's a nice enough model for the scale and suspect one that otherwise would not have come across the water w/out Tomy buying ERTL.

Since, I was young I always gravitated towards diecast trucks, tractors and heavy equipment and some of the diecast off-road dump trucks made by Hot Wheels, Matchbox, and Majorette were some of my favorite castings. There are a lot of hard rock quarries in my area therefore are bunch of off-road dump trucks operating especially ones in the 35 to 50 ton range. I know of one construction contractor/quarry has a fleet of old Euclid trucks from the 50's and 60's still working.

it is a good looking piece..as a rule i do not do truck.