The Tiger I had two sets of tracks. One was for fighting. The other was for getting onto a train.
Too wide for the railway
Armies moved tanks over long distances by rail, and a railway sets hard limits. Every load has to fit within the loading gauge — the outline that clears bridges, tunnels, platforms and trains on the next track. The Tiger, with the wide tracks it needed to carry 57 tonnes over soft ground, was wider than that outline allowed.
The solution was to give it a second, narrower set of tracks for transport. Before loading, the crew removed the wide combat tracks, took off the outer road wheels on each side, and fitted the narrow transport tracks. At the other end, they did the whole thing in reverse.
A day's work, twice
Changing tracks on a tank of that weight was heavy, slow work for the crew and for the recovery units that helped them, and it had to be done every time the tank went onto a train and every time it came off. It was one more part of the cost of a design that pushed everything — armor, gun, weight — to the limit.
The Tiger's successors were planned with the same problem in mind. The Tiger II followed the same approach with its own transport tracks.
The model
COBI's Panzer VI Tiger I Ausf. E, set 2677, is a 1:28 model built from 1,238 blocks, with one crew figure. Set 2588 is the Tiger 131 at the same scale.
It is available to pre-order. The expected shipping month is shown on the product page, and you can cancel any time before it ships.
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