Another M60A1 rolling through a German village. Looks like it’s assigned to the 8th infantry Division, but the armored Brigade it is assigned to is not known to me.
Four stroke 12-cylinder, Air-cooled, supercharged diesel engine, 1790 cu. in. displacement, doing about 1000 horsepower.
These engines were retrofitted on earlier M48A5 and used on the M88, as well as fitted into British Centurion tanks used by both Sweden and Israel, who also used them on their Merkava 1 through 3 series of tanks.
Totally agree. I was a supply clerk with a mechanized infantry unit, and I did a lot of modeling in those days. Going to the field gives you a lot of opportunities to get good reference pictures in the field, rather than just go to the motor pool and take pictures.
One of the coolest things I’ve ever done in my life was when we rail moved our unit when I was in the 3/8 Cav in Mannheim. The whole thing blew my mind. It turns out you cannot neutral steer a 55 ton vehicle on a wooden bed flatcar, so to load the vehicles, we had to drive them down the entire length of the train. As you drove a tank from one car to another, the flatcar would lift up into the air (look carefully at the picture below - you can see one lifting), it was totally freaky. I found a picture of it online. Oh, and because the train had low priority on West Germany’s busy rail network, it took the unit a day and a half to get to our destination. We partied in sleeper cars, getting drunk. It was a total blast.
Here’s a picture of it. These guys are driving down the entire length of the train, until every car is full. These guys are moving away from us (with ground guides). The tie downs are just hanging off the tanks.
True, but from my experience, it only works up to about 1.500m. Beyond that the ballistics are so different, that you might miss a tank sized target even if the .50 sits right on it.
