Renne McElroy
	Producer

Think back to your childhood – you, your trusty yellow Tonka truck and a sandbox. Hours of fun shoveling and hauling dirt, intermittently enacting the sounds of excavation with your mouth as you dump the heaping box. Pushing it around as fast as your legs could go. It was you, your imagination and your truck.

Now imagine that rugged little piece of equipment on a tougher grander scale. About 32 feet high, roughly the size of a two- story house, with a dump box big enough to carry 96 Ford Explorers and the fuel capacity for a Chevy pick-up to circle the earth. The Caterpillar 797- B off road mining truck – is the biggest dump truck in the world. A 3550 horsepower engine, the largest truck engine in history and six 14-foot tires, two in the front and four in the back with enough rubber to tread 500 passenger cars.

There’s no doubt that everything about this truck is huge, and shooting it seemed as big a task as building the actual truck. Our production schedule grew bigger and bigger as we narrowed in on how to coordinate the making of this enormous truck, our schedule and its parts. Six facilities across North America and four months of filming for a spectacular one hour show about a yellow 700- ton mining truck.

"There’s no doubt that everything about this truck is huge, and shooting it seemed as big a task as building the actual truck" - Renne McElroy

Our production teams traveled to six “Mega Factories” where everything was super-sized, from plasma cutters and weld guns to the torque tools and hand wrenches. It all started at the hot and humid Machine Company in Amite Louisiana, where they cast the frame, the backbone of the truck. The smell of molten metal permeated everything. Next, we traveled to Lafayette Indiana, where they create the 3550 horsepower engine. Michelin manufactures the five and a half ton tires in Lexington South Carolina. The cab comes to life in Joliet Illinois, the fifty-ton dump box is assembled in Canada. Where does the huge frame and most of the truck components all come together? At Caterpillar’s mega-factory in Decatur, Illinois.

It’s taken six factories across North America, Four months of filming, including a time lapse camera posted for 20 days, seven hundred tons of material, multiple teams - two producers, one whom was five months pregnant, six camera crews, four editors and about 80 days to assemble this engineering marvel. Finally, teams assemble the truck on site where the monster machine goes to work in Fort McMurray Canada near the sprawling Alberta Oil Sands. The opportunity to watch this monster machine haul and dump ore from the mine site to the processing plants, pushing the earth beneath it, surpasses any stretch of the imagination or any memories of a trusty yellow dump truck one could have. It’s an experience I will always remember.

Ultimate Factories: Caterpillar Airs Saturday February 2 at 8p et/pt

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