Check these out:

http://arcaneafvs.com/centavre165.html

The rack is for carrying steel trackway: http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_VsPSgPTQi.....s1600-h/36.jpg

Lots of variants here: http://anonymous-generaltopics.blog.....rion-tank.html

Do they still have the old Centurion behind Fork York Armouries?

I don't ever recall a Centurion outside of Fort York Armouries -- the place isn't too far from where I live, but there isn't much reason to go by it.

However, there was a Sherman tank turret at one time. My folks were into training dogs, and took me to the Armouries once a week or once very two weeks for a while. They'd lead dogs around and I'd run wild in the place. Spent a lot of time poking my nose into empty rooms wondering what they might have been used for once, and also climbed all over the turret. There were manual wheels to turn the thing, elevate the gun, etc. In time, they all broke down and eventuall the turret disappeared.

There might be a whole Sherman up by the Downsview Armouries or the officers' training school.

There used to be a Centurion parked behind the armouries near the railroad tracks under the Gardiner Expressway. I guess with all the development that the tracks aren't there anymore either. I think the tank Park in CFB Borden is still there though, on the corner of Dieppe and Waterloo, if you ever get the chance to visit.

Quite a fine collection here at the war museum in Ottawa now.

I recently saw a photo of the tank at Camp Borden, actually.

I dont' recall there being a Centurion near the Armouries, but I was a young kid in the 60s and it may have been out of sight from the parking lot where we entered.

Yes... and I really resent Ottawa having such a fine musuem of this and that and ninety-six other things. I wish to hell the taxpayer's money would build something in Toronto, where half the province lives!

Being a Toronto boy but having lived in the Ottawa area half my life my loyalties are divided. This city, sleepy and boring as it can be sometimes, does have a lot to recommend it. As long as you don't to take public transport to get you there! (the T-72 at the war museum runs better than the average OC Transpo bus).

I think the spending disparity may stem from this being home of the McGuintys.

You last line is most perceptive. Politicians are always more generous with taxpayers money in their own neighborhoods. That, and they like to show off to visiting politicians. But then when you get things like the G20 being saddled on T.O. like a visitation from an angry emperor -- I call it the Sack of Toronto -- you begin to feel that the provincial government really has it in for this city.

For instance. I live near the lakeshore, where there was a small park with a Lancaster on a pedestal, some artillery pieces, and nearby the H.M.C.S. Haida. They're all gone now. The Lanc, fortunately, was moved to the new Downsview museum. It's very small now, but has great potential. I don't know where the guns went. But I do know where the the Haida went. The province refused for years to fund its maintenance, and then suddenly moved it to Hamilton, to a new theme park, with full costs born by the province! Guess what? The new park was in Sheila Copps' riding. Whose idea was it? Sheila Copps?

It's things like this that make Torontonians paranoid about the rest of the country being out to get them.

Don't be paranoid, they ARE out to get you.

Yeah, too bad about the Haida, she was fun to crawl around on. And most of the museum renovations and construction around here was started or approved when Sheila "I'm nobody's baby!" (she got that right) Copps was heritage minister.

Still, it would be nice to live in a city that has a subway, rather than one that spends 700 million arguing about it before asking for another 700 million to study why we can't keep a football team, or a baseball team, or why our hockey team is 40 km out of town.

Nice dog parks here though.

I had read somewhere that Ottawa had a first rate public transist system -- it was one of my gripes, since the TTC is being allowed to rot by provincial penny-pinching. (Virtually no government funding at all, and an expansion program that breaks down to less per year than is lost in deficits.)

Perhaps its only downtown Ottawa that gets the funding? The city has extensive suburbs that may have almost no transit to speak of, for all I know.

I've been there a couple of times, maybe three, each was only a brief visit. The main thing I'd have to say in Ottawa's favour is that it isn't surrounded by a hundred miles of suburban development, small towns that are slowly merging into one huge metropolis, and boring farmland. There's some of that, but it seems possible to drive 10 or 1f minutes from Ottawa and be in what amount to vigin Canadian Shield. That's just not possible from Toronto. It's a half hour's drive to small pockets of countryside, and a full hour to the full-blown thing.

One problem Ottawa has is that for the services and facillities it tries to support, it's neither large enough nor concentrated enough. It's not even the second largest city in Ontario, after all.

A touchy subject with me.

Ottawa's transit system is a holdover from when everyone lived in the suburbs and worked right downtown. There is no east-west north-south grid like in Toronto. All the buses run from the outer fringes into the centre, and the closer you live to the centre the better the service is. But if you want to go in the opposite direction or (god forbid) east to west or north to south then you are out of luck. They also bought articulated buses designed for southern Europe that have to be taken off their routes when it snows (like that ever happens). The transit commission said they would phase them out they just bought 300 more. They got a bargain because the Chinese company that makes them had a big order cancelled. I think that their procurement office is the same one that picked our navy's submarines.

There is one light rail line that terminates in the middle of nowhere. It has been closed all summer for maintenance. The stations are outdoor platforms with no shelter and the tickets are on the honour system, no turnstiles. The floors of the cars are not level, and even with no-slip coating they are treacherous in the winter. The mobility impaired avoid them like the plague.

They have been debating a light rail system for ages and almost built one, but the route did not even come into Ottawa proper! It snaked through a number of a particular political parties ridings on the fringes. They quashed that, and lost some 200 million in the process. Now the Province and the Feds have promised some 700 million for an east-west line through the heart of downtown, but the city councillors continue to throw obstacles up. Progress and Ottawa are not synonymous.

Amalgamation has not helped. They took in more than they could handle and the services suffered. Size-wise its huge, but the population is only around 700,000 and most of them are spread along the 174/417 corridor. Its complicated by the fact that the National Capitol Commission owns great swaths of land that they sell to developers with no consultation or refuse to allow right of way through for necessary transportation projects. They are a power onto themselves. No one is really quite sure where they get this power from, or who 'they' are. I suspect aliens, the kind that keep books entitled 'To Serve Man' in the kitchen.

But it is a very beautiful and green city, with lots of parks and, like you say, its just a short drive (not as short as it used to be) to get to the Valley. It is a pleasure to drive to work when you pick your location carefully. I drive along the Ottawa River most of the way in to work and can cross the city by slinking from parkway to parkway. Lots of Bicycle trails and lanes here too. There are 47 parks where you can have a dog off leash and two 200+ acre dog parks, one in the west and one in the southeast. Walking, biking or driving along the canal and the rivers is relaxing.

Gatineau, on the dark side of the river, has similar problems, compounded by an insane rate of expansion. They do have a nice steam train running along the Gatineau river to Wakefield though.

I hear that T.O. is a parking lot from 6-9 and again from 4-7 every day. Must be easier living downtown than trying to commute.

It is true that the rush hour in T.O. is practically 8 a.m. to 7 p.m. with some light breaks around 10 and and 3. A friend of mine who lives in the inner city (but not downtown) and commutes to a workplace just north of the city line. It sometimes takes him two hours each way, and when there's an accident or extreme weather he may not get home until after 8. I don't know how he keeps from going crazy. I used to bitch when it took an hour getting from one place to another. The city is too damn centralized for its own good. Depsite the urbanization of Mississauga and communities north & east of Toronto, too many of those people are working *here.*

It sounds as though transit planning in Ottawa is a total botch from beginning to end, and with things so messed up there may be no logical way to fix things. How do you impose a north-south grid when there's already a radial grid? All I can think of is to rip out some of the radial lines -- make the remaining ones express -- and then develop a comprehensive grid. But spending money on making Canada work better isn't a Tory policy. Blowing up Arabs, supporting American defenese industries with huge, undebated purchases, and supplying the Communist Party of China's attempt to modernize its slave economy are Tory policies.

Ah, don't get me started. If there was a character limit on messages I'm sure I'd hit it going on about the Tories, or the liberals, the NDP, the Greens, the Bloc. Strangely enough, the nationalist party in Quebec shares its name with the slang term for English idiots. (Why are toilet bowls round? So the square heads don't drink from them.)

Its getting late, and the wine is sinking in. Time to sign off for the night. But it has been fun.

Oh, there is not one tank in Borden. there is like thirty or forty of them in a park right beside the transportation museum. I know, I had to paint them (twice).

Ciao

Liberals aren't too much better, I have to admit. The main thing going for them is that they aren't run by Steven Harper. The main thing that works against them is that they're led by Michael Ignatief. We'll never know what an NDP federal government would be like because everyone is afraid they're Marxists and will never vote for them.

Agh! You are trying to tempt me into responding in my weakened state. Begone ye evil siren!

Okay, one quick one. Imagine Bob Rae as leader of the Liberals taking a minority government in a future election and forming a coalition with the (federal) NDP to stay in power. Sound familiar to those of you who lived in Ontario back in the day? This time around everyone in the country would experience the Ontario 'Death Rae'.

Some of these were the newre AVRE 165 rather than the Motorman, but I found other shots of the tank I was looking for, thanks.

Can't be a motorman, there's no trolleycar!

The Centurion AVRE actually has a 165mm demo howitzer in the turret (charge equal to 6 x 120mm gun rounds).

...They also all have the dozer blade to the front, on the frontal hull.

The 4 vehicles used in Ireland for operation Motorman all had their guns deployed to the rear, covered/camouflaged over with tarpaulins, giving them the appearence of having no guns. This is actually how they went intpo action against the barricades. This would be why your photo ref makes you think they have no guns/are driving backwards.

A model I found a photo for shows the gun to the rear, casually draped with a tarp. As you can see in my sketch, I have the "stump" of a gun -- just a hunch.

Yeah - I have no idea why there's no gun. Even the artillery forward observer movels still have a main gun in them.

Some sort of field conversion?:

Maybe someone thought that the small number posted in Northern Ireland were unlikely to need a gun. What were they going to do with it? Blow up Catholic pubs, one by one?

One of my ongoing wants is to make a radio controlled Israeli "Shot Cal" Centurion from the '73 war. No one seems to make a really big scale Centurion (and the 'Shot Cal' version needs a lot of work to tilt the entire engine deck...)

There is a pretty large Tamiya kit, I believe. But cheap it ain't.

The British command tanks had fake or no guns on them, for the radios needed the room in the cramped turrets. Most engineer tanks need better radios then guns, for their mainly doing work horse stuff as their guarded by supporting forces. Better radio, able to hear the officer requiring their asses in a certain location right away, instead of relaying orders through other units.
Quite logical for I was in the CP truck for the repair guys, Call sign 8, on my DP1 Arty course for a day, 95 had issues and kept relaying orders to us through 11, which was annoying for we could hear them, but couldn't hear us, and wasting 11's radio space, for 11 was a gun position and needed the radio open for fire orders from the F00s. And our repair truck didn't have a nice radio, for it had no room for it, so we had to guess where our dam tow truck was at, or call their cellphones when they got out of our range.

And that BBQ grill was for trying on crossing supplies, like a few logs for ditches/holes/trenches/dislodging stuck shit or crossing rug, for soft ground which the tank would sink in.

I could understand a fake gun on the battlefield -- it would make command vehicles a target. "Ja, you yoost look for der tank vit der no cannon and dot's der vun mit der commander. Blow him to smiddereens and ve vin!"

"the gun was always removed, and the vehicle driven backward to use the dozer blade"

Shades of Soylent Green.

Better than the Russian "Brezhnev" armoured support vehicle. They removed the engine and used two companies of troops to push and pull it. Another company walked in front with brooms.

I'd rather have the Siberian Pickup Truck - a tank with the turret and top half cut off and replaced with a cab and cargo bed.

It would probably be the best way of getting around when the Siberian winter turns into Spring mud. The only thing is that you probably get 14 gallons to the mile. Unless you can steal the petrol from somewhere, or you *are* the Red Army, who in Siberia could afford it?