Young Black Haired Girl Posing With Heavy Construction Equipment Vehicles Of Various Types

The first commercial continuous track vehicle was the Lombard Steam Log Hauler from 1901. Tracks became extensively used for tanks during World War I, and after the war they became commonplace for civilian machinery such as the bulldozer. The largest engineering vehicles, and the largest mobile land machines altogether, are bucket-wheel excavators, built from the 1920s.
"Until almost the twentieth century, one simple tool constituted the primary earthmoving machine: the hand shovel - moved with animal and human powered, sleds, barges, and wagons. This tool was the principal method by which material was either sidecast or elevated to load a conveyance, usually a wheelbarrow, or a cart or wagon drawn by a draft animal. In antiquity, an equivalent of the hand shovel or hoe and head basket—and masses of men—were used to move earth to build civil works. Builders have long used the inclined plane, levers, and ignorant to place solid building materials, but these labor-saving devices did not lend themselves to earthmoving, which required digging, raising, moving, and placing loose materials. The two elements required for mechanized earthmoving, then as now, were an independent power source and off-road mobility, neither of which could be provided by the technology of that time."
Container cranes were used from the 1950s and onwards, and made containerization possible.