Revirescos 1/72 Austin-Kegresse Halftrack

 

It is interesting to note, that some of the best and most interesting WW1 AFV:s were produced by others than the major Powers. As mentioned elesewhere, the russians were in the forefront when it came to Armoured Cars, which they used in fairly large numbers from 1914 on.

 One of the drawbacks of all WW1 Armoured Cars, was that they were underpowered and pretty heavy, which made it difficult for them to move beyond the roads. 

This was of course noticed by the Russian Army as well, and they started thinking about ways of overcoming this. Already in 1909 had the director of the Tsars garage in Tsarskoye Tselo, Francis a Kegresse, designed a light track system to be used with the Russo-balt automobiles - not to be confused with the Russo-Balt Armoured Cars - and in 1913 this system was used with big success on a number of vehicles. (The Russian Army ordered a whole series for their own use.) 

In 1915 the order came to use the Kegresse system on the British designed Austin armoured cars. The trials with these vehicles started in August 1916, and as this went very well this, 50 vehicles were ordered. 

This means that the Russian Army was the first to use Armoured Halftracks operationally, but as they only were completed until 1919, they were never used in WW1. Instead they were employed during the Civil War, by all sides and, as they were impressed in Trotskijs Red Army, they were also used in the War against the Allied Interventionist Forces and finally in the Russo-Polish War of the early 20-ies. This is how it looked like in real life:

And this is how the kit - and the built kit - cover looks like (notice that Reviresco calls it Austin-Putilov, while the strictly correct designation would be the above, Russian Austin -or austin-Putilov - with Kegressedrive).

This is one of Revirescos best offerings, really. As always with Reviresco it is made in White Metal, and the mouldings are crisp and sharp, with a minimum of moulding lines - otherwise a curse of all White Metal kits. As you can see in the picture below, it contains quite a number of parts. It is also accurate, although a bit tricky to build - you really need some kind of a jig to get all the parts of the main body together. AS I see it, there are only two problems with this nice kit. First a small one: the chain drive on the half-track units is missing altogether, so I guess you have to scratch that one altogether. 

Then a pretty big one: the turrets are pretty bad: not only are they marred by prominent mould lines, the MG:s are moulded integrally with the shields around them - making them into one big... blob - and lastly the turret roof is completely closed, although it should be a opening here, allowing the MG to be used against aerial targets. I guess you either have to build a new turret, or just replace the MG:s and the armoured covers. Recommended.

(Thanks for Michal Derala for his helpful corrections! Also check out his site.)