In the works V

A few days ago I promised a look at our first bridgelayer and then promptly forgot. Better late than never, right? So here it is: the MTU-55. Developed by the Czech from the T-54/55 chassis, the MTU-55 used a hydraulic drive system to deploy an 18 meter long (or just over 59 feet) scissor bridge with a capacity of 50 tons at the press of a button. Developed as an answer to the problem of bridging the thousands of water obstacles, to say nothing of blown bridges, cratered roads and anti-tank ditches that would cause a Soviet attack on the West severe problems, more than 1700 vehicles were built for Warsaw Pact armies as well as Soviet friendly nations all over the world.

Completely harmless right?

Unless you didn’t want a few hundred of its friends to cross that river

Without the bridge

Even at our usual 1/100 scale, the MTU-55 is a massive model and will make a nifty hobby project or terrain piece. It will come with 1 one piece bridge in folded configuration and 1 two piece bridge.

Meanwhile, on the other side of the Atlantic, the US Army had a problem. Acktually, it had a lot of problems, but today we’re going to talk about one in particular. The Jeep is often credited with being one of the weapons that won the war for the US, but it did have some shortcomings. There were places it couldn’t go, like jungle and swamps. While some armies would have shrugged and told off a spare regiment or 20 to hand carry cargo, that wasn’t the American way. If nothing else, Private Snuffy had a mother, and his mother had her congressman’s phone number and no compunctions about raising heck if she thought her son wasn’t being treated right. Much better to avoid angry Congressional delegations altogether. Anyway, it was the 1950s and America’s love affair with the automobile was in full swing. There had to be car that could go where even Jeeps couldn’t, and if there wasn’t someone would invent one.

One of the answers was the M274 Mechanical Mule. A thoroughly minimalist design without a body, doors or even a suspension, a whopping 18 horsepower and a top speed of 25 mph, no one was going win any races in a mule, but they could pull a number of other tricks. It could still carry nearly 800 lbs of cargo absolutely anywhere that didn’t require swimming. And if the water was calm mules could easily be converted into boats. The steering wheel could be unlocked from it’s nearly vertical configuration and flipped over allowing the operator to walk or even crawl and still drive the mule, which went a long way toward making up for the complete lack of armor. More than 11000 M274s were built for the Army, carrying anything that could be made to fit.

With M40 106mm recoilless rifle

With BGM-71 TOW

This is a tiny model, and will be sold in pairs with no cargo or the weapons shown above. MTU-55 and the mechanical mule will go on sale this week along with our new Swedish line.