Hi all,
One of the marking options in the Revell kit of the Leopard 1 (the early version) is a Dutch tank. It’s supposed to be a tank of A Eskadron, 41 Tank Bataljon, Regiment Huzaren Prins Alexander, in Bergen-Hohne, 1977. The tank bears the name Athene. Does anybody have or know of pictures of this tank?
I guess this will not help much, but here’s how it looked back in 2015, when it was used for recovery exercises…
Another view
H.P.
That poor thing needs a necromancer rather than a recovery. 
Have you looked at Mike Shackleton’s excellent Leopard Club website? It’s a gold mine there.
Here’s the NL reference page from his site:
https://leopardclub.info/InTheField/Netherlands/Leopard_1NL/
Pictures 170-181 might interest you 
Note the direction of the track chevrons in that pic - what would your average competition judge say if your model looked like that?
Theses pics would make a great diorama idea
give this site a look over lots of pictures of exercises.
Really interesting thread here.Im a fan of Leopard 1 and 2 up to the A4 version.Im hoping sometime to do a Netherlands Leopard and an early Belgian version as well as my started ones in stash.It would be great if somebody did maybe a 3D set to do all the additions to make the Dutch version before they stopped using them.
Richard
Richard, Revell do the Leo 1 to replicate a Belgian and a Dutch version; I’m sure you’re aware of these.
This might help:
Many thanks for the info.
Richard
Id forgot about these kits Brian.
Cheers from Richard
Apart form the original early types, they also do a couple of subsequent versions too; well worth it in my opinion. Some purists might want to replace the rubber band tracks but they’re good enough I feel(!)
Beware there that Revell has two entirely different series of Leopard 1 kits. The older ones are Italeri reboxes, the newer ones are new tool. These four you show are the latter, but the older “Leopard” 1 A1A1-A1A4 (No. 03017) and “Leopard” 1A5 (No. 03028) kits are Italeri.
Not un-common for Dutch Leopards and Cheetahs to have the reversed chevron track. The perfect way to make an uninformed armour judge’s head explode.
PRTLs 
Only the A2 version was officially “Cheetah”, and that only because the army gave in to popular pressure.
(The reason everybody thinks the PRTL was called “Cheetah” is apparently because the first vehicle shown to the press had that name on the front of the turret, and everyone figured that they put that name there because that’s what the type was called. But actually, that name was there because it was a vehicle from an active unit and so had an individual vehicle name that started with the battery letter. If I had a time machine, I would make them show the vehicle from your photo to the press instead )
So that it would be called the Alamy
Funny piece of Dutch armoured history. So if they called it Gepard….it still translates from German to English as Cheetah. Was the official Dutch designation simply the Pantser Rups Tegen Luchtdoelen (PRTL)?
