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Chattanooga Railway museum got a Driver Wheel lathe a few years back (10-15?) what had been shipped to Poland or some such. Couple of guys there tried to get me to run it for 'em, but it's just a bit too far away.
There's a big metal planer shop in that city also, which I have had do some work. BIG CHIPS!
Of course, sending driver wheels from England
would probably be frightfully expensive...
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03-15-2010 11:08 AM
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The planers sure do create swarf, you want to see the swarf that comes off the planing machines that plane the rail way lines in to the switches & crossings
I just brought one back to the UK for London Underground, from just out side of Chicago, its bed length is 45ft.
Last edited by Simon P; 03-15-2010 at 12:59 PM.
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Thank You to Simon P For This Useful Post:
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Most US gear when it is no longer serviceable is now turned over the the DMRO folks to sell off. However what happend to all of the web gear the national guard had to support the M1 Garand and carbine in the 60's. Also where are all of the M16A2's now that the army is using the M4. The stuff has to be sitting somewhere.
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When I was in the Coast Guard, my first ship had been in service since WWII and parts we had on hand in Engineering did not match inventory. At all. So we had an "inventory correction" a hundred miles or so off California, just past where the green water turns to blue. I shed tears as I heaved a huge raw water pump off a Fairbanks-Morse main diesel into the drink. Solid brass except where it was monel - worth what? $20,000? And it went on for hours.
jn
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I know this is a Milsurp site but my love of trains is about to "come out". They still run a few steam trains in Poland and a good friend of mine has a buddy in England that goes every year to Poland to operate steam loco's. You pay for doing it but I guess it is great fun. They run a regular schedule with mostly freight. There is a great rail museum on the ourskits of Krakow I have visited and for you airplane buffs there's a fantastic Air Museum right in Krakow. The cost of getting in the Air Museum was under two dollars and I had to pay about another dollar fifty to take pictures. Both are worth seeing if you get near Krakow which is one beautiful city. The Air Museum is located at what is left of a airfield the Nazi's used in WW2. I have visited Krakow four times and each time find new and interesting things to see.
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In 1976, in Vienna Austria, I witnessed a rather exciting phenomenon. They were tearing down an old building, to make room for a new high rise and unearthed a cache of weapons. There was all sorts of stuff, bolt actions, several types of smgs, GPHMGs, cases of grenades, mortars, panzerfausts, pistols of all sorts and pile after pile of cases of ammunition.
It was all mostly new when hidden. I have no idea how extensive the cache was. It went under at least two other buildings as far as I could tell and followed what looked to be either an old tunnel or maybe bomb shelter system.
There was a hell of a lot of excitement for a few hours and police were on the scene in about 20 minutes. Army reps showed up maybe 10 minutes later.
Within a few hours, they had walled off the whole perimeter with 4x8 sheets of plywood and stationed security all around the area.
There was no way to get within a 100 meters of the area.
The trucks started rolling in the next morning and started to haul it all away. It took them several days to finish the job.
When I talked to the old fellow I was staying with. Herr Grubel, said it used to be a fairly common situation. He also said that by the late 50s, it had become quite rare for such caches to be found.
Herr Grubel, hated Russians. He was a POW in one of their labor camps until 1952, when he escaped and made it home.
He felt then that for every cache of such weapons that were uncovered, there were 10 more buried. During the last days of the war, weapons littered the streets. The warehouses were unmanned and unwatched. Many Austrians prepared for guerrilla warfare, until they realised enough was enough and the Russians would withdraw back to Czechoslovakia.
That didn't mean they were about to turn the weapons over to the government though.
So far as I know, all of the cache was destroyed. I never heard anything about it afterwards.
It made a big splash on their daily television for a few hours, then nothing. The gov't didn't put a lid on it, there just wasn't any interest by the general public.
Last edited by bearhunter; 04-05-2010 at 02:26 AM.
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Originally Posted by
cafdfw
I hope they didn't end up as this poor Inland did during the (un-named president) error. (I mean era)
I had a friend who retired as a supervisor of a large Federal Penitentiary a few years ago, and he loves all things WWII. He has a fully restored jeep, etc.
He told me that during 'that era' the federal penitentiary here replaced all of the
M1 carbines they had always used with newer rifles. He said the carbines were seldom if ever fired, and most all were in very good condition.
They were told they had to destroy them and they weren't allowed to sell, or even give them to sheriff departments etc. They didn't have facilities to cut them up so they took them to an asphalt area, put them side by side, and repeatedly ran over them with a bulldozer. Then dug a deep trench at their location and buried all of the smashed and broken pieces.
He said there was a truck about the size of a medium 'U-Haul' moving truck stacked half full of carbines.
It's unbelievable how much has been wasted.
Regards
Gunner
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Originally Posted by
Simon P
The planers sure do create swarf, you want to see the swarf that comes off the planing machines that plane the rail way lines in to the switches & crossings
I just brought one back to the
UK for London Underground, from just out side of Chicago, its bed length is 45ft.
I've a 14ft one slowly corroding away outside a self storage warehouse. No place to put it!
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