News last week that the state has sold the old Idaho Transportation Department headquarters property on State Street to developers brought up a question among some of us in the newsroom. What’s going ...

A steam shovel found embedded in the bottom of Wixom Lake in October 2020 is well on its way to being fully restored. Mike Oberloier, of Beaverton, who now owns the shovel, recently displayed parts of ...

Our street was hectic and noisy for two months last summer as a storm drainage system was brought up to snuff. Hearing an at times steady vroom-vroom and ding-ding-ding, I wondered about the ...

The cable-operated excavator is the earliest documented self-powered machine ever used to move earth. Its earliest form, the steam shovel, has roots going back to the very first mechanical excavator, ...

I became captivated by steam shovels as a tiny tot. How could I not after having “Mike Mulligan and His Steam Shove”l by Virginia Lee Burton read to me multiple times. I am sure I was not the only one ...

The vintage steam shovel that for the last nine years has sat outside the Nederland Mining Museum took a long, circuitous route to the small Boulder County mountain town. The steam shovel’s first stop ...

The 1930s are bookended by two classics of children’s literature: Watty Piper’s “The Little Engine That Could” (1930) and “Mike Mulligan and His Steam Shovel" (1939) by Newton Centre (Massachusetts) ...

The American steam shovel—and all steam shovels are of American manufacture—marks an era in man's conquest of nature. One of the most powerful of the tools that steam and steel have made possible, it ...

I loved the children’s story Mike Mulligan and His Steam Shovel when I was young. Mike Mulligan, the operator of Mary Anne, his beloved steam-powered excavating machine, attempts to dig a cellar for ...

Now that the state has sold the 44-acre site of the Idaho Transportation Department headquarters on State Street, what will become of the old steam shovel that’s housed there now? Scott ...