Paus Brand Guidelines: The 1968 Emsbüren Family Firm Building Vehicles for Mines and Tunnels

A family machine works in the Emsland.

Paus is the trading name of Hermann Paus Maschinenfabrik GmbH, a machine works in Emsbüren, a small town in the Emsland district of Lower Saxony, close to the Dutch border. German Wikipedia says the company was founded in 1968 by Hermann and Agnes Paus, and the company’s own site describes it as a family business founded by Hermann Paus in that year “for special vehicles.” A 2018 report in the trade magazine AT Minerals also called Paus a family-owned company, and the supplier KTR gives the same founding year and town in its own profile of the firm.

The early business was construction machinery. German Wikipedia says the first products were machines such as wheel loaders and dumpers, and that vehicles for mining and tunnelling, inclined lifts, aerial work platforms and cranes were added later. That mix still defines the firm: Paus describes itself today as a maker of construction machines, industrial vehicles, lift technology, machines for underground mining and special vehicles, all developed, designed and built at the Emsbüren site.

In 2002 the founders’ sons, Franz-Josef Paus and Wolfgang Paus, took over management, German Wikipedia says, citing a 2010 profile in the magazine Metallbau; the company site names the two brothers as its current leadership. German Wikipedia adds that a joint venture in China was set up in 2006 and that a North American subsidiary, Paus North America Inc., followed in 2021, and it gives the export share as about 65 per cent, citing the company. Sales outside Germany run through a dealer network, which the company describes as worldwide.

Utility vehicles for the underground.

Paus’s underground range is built around vehicles that move people, materials and services. Its mining and tunnelling page lists loaders (the PFL series), dump trucks (the PMK series), service and lift-platform vehicles, scalers for removing loose rock from tunnel roofs (the PScale), road-maintenance graders and custom builds. The utility carriers — the Uni 40, Uni 50, UNIVERSA 55 and MinCa 18 — appear across almost every task on that page, from fuel and lubricant service and mobile workshops to explosives charging, concrete spraying and personnel transport.

KTR, a German coupling and cooler supplier, describes in a customer profile how the MinCa series carries passengers and materials underground with payloads of up to four tonnes, and how different superstructures can turn a base vehicle into an explosives transporter, a service vehicle or a fire engine. Paus’s own wording is similar: its vehicles, it says, are built on standard platforms in industrial processes, then fitted out to each customer’s task. The company slogan, used on its site, is “…the people who care.”

The most documented single product is the MinCa 5.1. In its September 2018 issue, AT Minerals reported that this universal mining vehicle, produced in Emsbüren and sold for two years as a diesel, was going into series production in electric and hybrid versions developed with Danfoss Mobile Electrification, whose EDITRON drive train it uses. The magazine gave its size as about 4 by 1.75 metres with a payload of 1.2 tonnes, and described it as aimed at passenger and material transport in mines.

How mining equipment makers present themselves.

Mining equipment makers sell machines that most people never see at work. Their customers are mine operators, tunnelling contractors and quarry owners, and the machines spend their working lives underground or at the far end of an open pit. So the trade’s imagery tends to bring the site to the viewer: a drill rig in a floodlit tunnel, its booms reaching towards a rock face; a loader or haul truck in yellow or orange, picked out against grey stone; the beam of a headlamp in the dark.

Above ground, the favoured view is from high up. Photographs of open-pit mines show stepped benches cut into the earth, with trucks and drill rigs reduced to small bright shapes on the terraces. Underground pictures work the other way, close and cramped, with the machine filling the frame and the rock wall just beyond it.

Much of the rest of the visual language comes from proving that the machines work. Makers show equipment in test mines and at customer sites, and show it to the trade at fairs such as MINExpo International, which is organised by the US National Mining Association and describes itself as the industry’s largest global mining event; its next edition is scheduled for September 2028. Stands at such fairs put full-size rigs and loaders on display, often alongside screens showing the same machines below ground.

Behind the pictures sit very different companies. Some are divisions or spin-offs of large listed engineering groups; others are family firms or privately owned specialists built around one process, such as spraying concrete or charging explosives. This guide sets out what can be checked about each brand — who founded it, who owns it and where it says its machines are made — and marks clearly what rests only on the company’s own word.

Built in Emsbüren, sold through dealers.

Above ground, Paus sells to builders and local councils. Its company page lists articulated swing loaders (the SL 9075 and SL 9088), telescopic loaders and telescopic swing loaders, and low-bed and front-tipping dumpers, which it says are popular on building sites and with municipalities for their manoeuvrability in tight spaces. Its lift-technology division makes inclined lifts for building work and furniture removal, trailer cranes (the PTK 27 and PTK 31) and aerial work platforms; the newest inclined lift, it says, is the Easy 24 WH-M. An industrial-vehicle line adds compact heavy-duty forklifts, with combustion or electric drive, and tractors for industrial use.

The company spans both worlds. German Wikipedia files the company as a construction-machinery maker, while trade coverage of Paus, such as the AT Minerals report on the MinCa 5.1, places it among suppliers of underground vehicles. Paus’s own pages describe more and more of its machines as available with electric drive, and its mining page has a separate section for electric and battery solutions across the Uni, UNIVERSA, MinCa and PFL ranges; the details are the company’s own.

Paus is still family-run. The company site describes it as a family business with tradition, led by the founders’ sons, and says its products are developed, designed and built at Emsbüren. Its German name, Hermann Paus Maschinenfabrik, keeps the founder’s name on the company.

For a design guide, Paus shows how a regional family machine works can present a wide catalogue — mine trucks, scalers, inclined lifts and swing loaders — under one name and one slogan. Compare Liebherr, another family-owned machine maker of German origin with a broad range, and Getman, a maker of underground utility vehicles. For this guide we use a slate, a deep shaft blue-grey, an amber and a pale mist with a condensed sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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