[Javier de Luelmo - Diesel]

Like me and lots of friends from here, you have arrived to the same conclusion: we have turned our back to history. Maybe it's just a "iberian illness", that of forgeting or destroying everything that was part of our own history... Some people have a very peculiar idea about what "real" modernisation means. And changing the mind, and the way things are made after such a stormy history as ours, it's quite a challenge.

I'm now 36 years old and have grown up between lots of the more interesting stuff you could think. I remember breaking my pants as a kid inspecting every yard I could go with my bicycle (pity i didn't have a camera at the time!), playing UNDER a White 666, or going back every bar or gas station the family stopped in a trip, looking at strange old things with wheels (or my first Volvo F-88, brand new and covered with a protective, greasy layer?). My own father and grandfather worked with so diverse vehicles like ZIS-5, DUKW (I saw one still swimming for their company in a damm in 88!), GMC 353 and Magirus, as an example. We have had a real travelling treasure up and down the whole country, after that it spent some time under the sun in yards and verges, today it's quite difficult to find some examples of once common vehicles. And as you, I'm horrified about what has happened to it. Only 5-7 years back you could still find a 1928 Chevy, or a Ford BB, a 3-ton Dodge... some of them have been recovered, but the most have gone to the furnaces. Even pieces of our very own motor history like the Pegaso "Mofletes" ("cheeks") or the Barreiros Saeta are gone... two or three survivors in captivity, no more. Sometimes the owners asked too much money for merely a chassis-cab with no engine, axles or the like. Others, there was simply no way to get them. Also, there has been no interest from military and politics to collect and store old army (or commercial) vehicles, or to start AND maintain museums, to encourage the conservation of old vehicles, or to simply to make things easier for the (very few) collectors and get their pride and joy back to the road. Or to listen to people who, like me and friends (we all live in city flats, don't have those nice little homes with garages at the back like some of you!), would volunteer to spend a whole weekend covered in grease and old paint restoring anything, anywhere. I could tell frightening histories about all that stuff... like an army unit burning hundreds of TMs last year as it was living their old barracks to new ones. An officer friend of myself nearly burned his hands trying to recover some of them when he was aware of that (where on earth would you find a near new manual for a Henschel 33...). Or dozens of Dodge Beeps piled along a wall in a garrison (just in front of a friend home, we could see them perfectly) and an bulldozer coming to flat them and put them on trailers to the furnaces...

Now it's too late...

For the military aficionados, our only hope it's a real, new, military vehicles museum in Madrid. The idea was launched last spring, the project memory is ready and, knowing some of the staff who is working on it, if all goes the right track, it's a winner. Will take time to know the solution, but we are keeping crossed our fingers.

Meanwhile I'll try to post some pics with findings in a day or two.