TrevorLarkum

tankmaker1 - if you have any photographs or information to add to my write-up of Barnbow they would be much appreciated: Royal Ordnance Factory, Barnbow, Crossgates, Leeds I'm particularly keen on photographs of the inside showing tanks being built. You can get some idea from here: British Tank Factories

Cheers, guys - the warm welcome is much appreciated! Yep - the merger took place not long after I left. I'm sure there must be other ex-Tanks on the forum, just hiding in the woodwork!

Hiya everyone. I've been a member of this forum for a year or so and decided it was time I got posting. I know quite a lot of people here, like Hanno (mcspool) for a couple of decades, plus Adrian (tankbarrell), Tichenor, PzKpfw-e and others from the AFV News forum, plus I recently met Iain (sharky) at Armourgeddon and he prompted me to get more active here. I've been compiling data on preserved tanks since the 1970s. In my teens and at university I travelled around Europe and the USA visiting collections large and small. After university I joined the 3rd Royal Tank Regiment, training on Chieftains at Bovington and BATUS and serving on Challengers in Germany (plus 6 months as infantry in South Tyrone just as the first Gulf War kicked off). The first picture shows my squadron at Deilinghofen in 1989. While in the Army and for ten years afterwards I continued to track down preserved tanks. I was lucky enough to be one of the first western visitors to Kubinka and wrote up the collection for a series in Military Modelling in the early 1990s. Meanwhile I had started writing a series of books and published them under the banner of Armour Archive, they were Preserved German Tanks 1: A7V to Panzer IV, PGT2: Panzer V Panther to Leopard 2, Preserved Tanks in France and Preserved Tanks in Russia. At that point kids came along and things went on hold. Then in 2007, once they got a bit bigger, I picked up the reins again, and now spend my time developing the PreservedTanks.com website. I continue to travel and visit collections, and through my work (I'm a company director of a very small software house) I am able to get to some fairly exotic locations. For example, I recently wrote Preserved Tanks in Brazil. The second picture is of me on an M3A3 at Sao Goncalo, near Rio de Janeiro. That's me in a nutshell. I hope you'll have patience if I start asking people for information and photographs for the database! It works both ways, of course. PTC does not yet have very good options for searching, but I'm working on that, starting with the ability to search via location. That's not yet public, but I'm happy to provide links here, given below. BTW, for each tank I track the locations it has visited in its life. That always starts with where it was built, of course, so there's quite a lot of information on the site about tank factories. Preserved Tanks by Location Tanks Factories and Facilities All Tank Related Locations