In Northern California a guy named Jacques Littlefield amassed a collection of armored vehicles and restored them. He died earlier this year but apparently you can arrange for tours via email. Would love to get a chance to check that stuff out.
You can check out some visitor pics here
http://home.comcast.net/~szee1a/tanks/tanks.html
How the hell does someone even move an IS-3, let alone neatly park it amidst a forest of other tanks? That thing weighs over 100,000 pounds.
Amazing collection. Thanks for the link.
I was at bovington this year with my six year old son. We had a fantastic (if rushed) time.
That Littlefield private collection is amazing. Tracy the article says he gets the tanks actually runnable?! I would dearly love to see a JS3 rolling.
That’s one hell of a private collection. I hope it gets a good (public) home!
Here’s the Panther taken out for a test run. Apparently for July 4th Jacques Littlefield used to buy a bunch of cheap cars, invite the neighbors out for a visit, and then everyone would get to watch the tanks crush the cars. RIP Jacques.
It truly is an impressive collection. There is warehouse after warehouse filled with tanks.
Cliffski mentioned how small the Hetzer was. Here’s a Panzer I from the Littlefield Collection. It felt barely larger than a sportcar.
By way of comparison we got to clamber around the main body of the Panther while they were working on it (turret was not yet mounted) and that thing was just huge. Here’s a photo of a friend standing next to the Panther (image cropped since I’m not sure how my friend’s going to feel about having her image posted on the Internet).
Really insanely impressive.