How Do You Ship the Biggest Trucks in the World?

You drive them, you idiot. But if that's not an option—say, if you're shipping your Belaz mining truck from Belarus to South Africa—you've got to break them into pieces. Hulking, multi-ton pieces.

English Russia's got a series of photos detailing how some of the largest vehicles on the planet, the 35-foot-long, 26-foot-high Tonka-styled mining trucks from Belarusian manufacturer Belaz, known in mining truck circles as "the Komatsu of the Balkans" (I made this up), get shipped from one place to another. The first stage is to break these things down into slightly smaller, though still obscenely huge, parts. Cue comically oversized pieces of machinery in unusual positions, now:

The pieces are then transported by train, plane or flatbed truck to their destination, where they are reassembled, Transformers style, into the comically huge vehicles we all know and love/fear/resent for ruining our sense of scale. And the fun isn't over, apparently: the 260,000lb trucks aren't exactly morning people:

During the first start-up of an each car, engine makes such an awful noise that the human ear can barely stand it.