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Triple 657

Digging Up the Past

Peterson Designs Triple 657s for San Luis Canal

In the mid-60s, engineer, Buster Peterson (brother to founder) designed and built tandem and triple 657 scraper machines to meet the demands of moving more dirt, faster. The results were mixed but they made history for Peter Kiewit on their portion of the San Luis Canal down in California's Central Valley. Further south, Guy F. Atkinson was working their 15 mile stretch with tandem and triple LeTourneau electric scrapers. Both Peterson and Caterpillar knew they needed to come up with something quick or lose a lot of future revenue and market share to LeTourneau.

What Buster and his crew came up with rocked the industry: a monster 6-engine, 6-axle, 186-ft long machine with 2850 hsp and a 150 cu yd capacity. In the spring of 1965, the Triples and two tandem units shipped to Kiewit's contract near Coalinga. Once the Atkinson's job was over, there was no more dirt moved with LeTourneau on the Canal. "The CATs just ate them up. They hauled more dirt; they moved faster; they just did a better job with less down-time," recalls retired Peterson field service veteran, Vern Renwick.

Jerry Bennett, Operating Engineer Local 3 President (mid-90s) was one of the Triple's operators during the 1965-66 season, hand-picked by Peterson. "It was one of the highlights of my life. I can see now, why it would take a young man with quick reflexes to run it. You had to be a damn good operator. You damn near had to be a typist." The huge machine required talent, a steady hand and total concentration. The operator sat in an elevated cab positioned over the left wheel of the first scraper. According to Bennett, "it had a 90º turning radius so you could touch the back to the front." With its 6 pivot points, the machine looked like a giant snake when it got jack-knifed, which it did, according to Bennett, many times. "One night after it had rained, the job super told me to dig in this muddy area and I got that machine stuck so bad it took them two days to get it out. And he got fired over it."