Railway Museum

Once I finished reading the morning paper, MRS Bunkermeister and I visited the Railpark Train Museum in Bowling Green, Kentucky.

The museum is located in and around the former L&N Railroad terminal.  Louisville and Nashville Railroad that is.

The view from the cab for the engineer.

And the engineers set and throttle control.  They had a number of very nice exhibits inside the building and a small passenger train outside.  We got to take a tour of the train.

They also had this old caboose, sort of the office for freight trains.

They also have a hospital train car that they intend to restore.

They also have a train layout with windows that look out to the real trains on the tracks next to the museum.  Real working trains also pass by on another set of rails next to the trains on display.

The layout represents Bowling Green, Kentucky in the 1960's ish.  Sort of.

It's HO scale and all it needs are a couple hundred military vehicles and a few thousand troops and it would be perfect!

Aviation Museum

MRS Bunkermeister and I visited the Bowling Green, KY, Aviation Heritage Park recently.

Each aircraft is of a type that was used by a local Kentucky member of the US Armed Forces, like this UH-1B Huey helicopter from the Vietnam War.

This T33 is a training jet used by the USAF during the Cold War.

The F4 Phantom II used by the Air Force in Vietnam.  The color scheme is the southeast Asia camouflage.

US Navy Panther jet, GI Joe got a jet of this type, but I never had one.

F111 Aardvark bomber also in Vietnam War colors.  Local places often have museums about local events or local people.  These aircraft look like they could taxi out and fly away.  I am sure they are just hollow shells but they are kept in great looking condition.  They are close to breaking ground on a building to house more artifacts.

Table

Work continues on the wargame tables in the basement.

 Two tables, 40 feet long and 7 feet wide and 40 inches high.

The four shelves and the floor will store underbed storage boxes.

Five boxes per stack, enough for 400 boxes.  I will fill most of those spaces.

Each side will have two side tables of 2 feet deep and 7 feet long along the wall.

The side tables are for off board artillery, air fields, and for conducting bridging operations from side table to the main table.

The orange lines on the ceiling are the fire sprinklers.  Burning plastic is poisonous and so it seemed a reasonable precaution.

Germans and Shermans

Early production Lee tank and Sherman tank.

In 1940 the Germans invaded France and one of the strongest tanks in their army was the Panzer IV with the short barreled 75mm cannon. The US Army had sent observers to France to report back on the action and the 75mm guns were a big surprise to the US Army. American medium tanks only had 37mm guns so something had to be done. The American M2 and M2A1 medium tanks with 37mm guns in a fully rotating turret had been outclassed overnight. Over 1,000 were on order but were now obsolete. America needed a 75mm gun tank and right away.

Mock up Panzer IV used by US Army for training.

There had been a proposal to mount a 75mm gun in a sponson on one side. They had the blueprints and even made a mock up. It would take at least a year to design and draw the blueprints for a tank with a 75mm gun in a fully rotating turret. So they modified the self-propelled gun version into a tank with a 75mm gun in a sponson and called it the M3 Lee tank. It was intended only for training so the troops could get used to a 75mm gun while they waited for the production of the new tank.
In September the first prototype tank was completed with a fully rotating turret armed with a 75mm gun in American history, the T6. After a few modifications it was standardized as the M4 Sherman tank. So don't compare the Sherman to the Panther or the Tiger, they were years newer than the Sherman, compare it to the Panzer IV, the tank it was designed against.