I'm still enthused about just how efficient the digger which made my track was, in comparison to how many man-hours of physical labour with barrows and hand tools it would have taken.
In just one day for 400 EU I had a 100 metre long, two metre wide track made!
Comparing the Digger made track to hypothetical manual labour....
Making the track consisted of
- digging out rock and earth where there was too much material.
- Depositing rock and earth where there was too little material to 'build up' the track.
- Moving the rock and earth from where it wasn't needed to where it was needed.
- Final levelling of the track.
The track is about 100 metres long and two and a half metres wide and my very rough approximation tells me there's about a barrow load of compacted earth per 'barrow sized area'.
My barrow measures around 1 metre long by 0.5 metres wide so that's 100 barrows times five worth of earth which very roughly covers the whole track = 500 barrows.
How long would it take me to dig out and move ONE barrow load of earth and rock?
Quite a long time - firstly I'd have to use a pick axe to cleave the rock and earth out, then a spade to load up the barrow, then move it and compact it down....
I think if I was 'getting on with it' I could manage all of that in somewhere between 5-10 minutes, so leet's call it 10 barrow loads an hour, or around 60 barrow loads in a 6 hour day - I couldn't possibly do more than that in a day, it would kill me.
So that's 500/ 60 days that it would have taken me to just move the dirt around by hand on my own, = 8.3 days.
And on top of that I'd have to go back over it and flatten it and level it by hand, I don't know what with - whereas the digger did that automatically just by driving back and forth over the track several times in the course of making it!
Assuming a rate of 100 EU a day that's > 800 EU of labour, and the digger rate was half that at 400 EU a day, and completed the work in, well, one day, AND almost certainly did a nicer job than what would have been achievable by hand!
Oh, another disadvantage if I'd have done this by hand would have been having my soul destroyed, through the mind-numbing nature of the task.
Whereas with the digger involved the task becomes like an art form, something which was enjoyable to watch.
Sometimes, it's just RIGHT to pay for industrial machinery to do certain jobs - or maybe 'APPROPRIATE' is a better word!