It's about 4 weeks since I went on a week and 2600 km tour with my motorcycle visiting air force museums, tank museums, heritage railways and exhibited model railways in Finland and Sweden. If you didn't follow the blogger posts from my trip, I'll add some links to them here:
It would be nice to finish off and visit the Norwegian equivalents to them all, but in Norway there is no own Tank or Armored Vehicles Museum. The Norwegian Defence Museum just stock it's collection of vehicles in a store not open to the public. So when there was arranged a military vehicles exhibition in the old camp of the Tank Corps last weekend, I decided to go. Last time this was arranged in 2019, The Norwegian Armed Forces Museum opened their stores and exhibited their hughe vehicle collection. It was sunny and a nice day for a ride again....
Tankfest '24
When I arrived Trandum camp I was very disappointed. The Armed Forces Museum had just brought out and exhibit some very few of their own vehicles. The rest of the 'exhibition' was just various military associations displaying thei private military vehicles...
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| A 'found' reunion with an old acquaintance from my own service |
This is a modelling blog, so here is a couple of models too:
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| A 1:6 scale (RC) Leopard 2 tank in the livery of it's service with the Norwegian Army |
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| A drive able 'model' of a Tiger 1, based upon half a chassis of BV206 tracked vehicle. This is not a model for the 'Rivet Counters' |
Not too impressive this time, so I'll ad some photos from the Tankfest '19 instead, as this was far more interesting:
Luckily the Norwegian Air Force Museum is located just right by this camp, so I decided to go there instead.
The Air Force Museum at Gardermoen
The Norwegian Air Force Museum did not start off in very impressive premises nor collection:
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| A 1:72 scale model of the original Air force Museum from 'back in the days' |
Today they're located in a brand new building and have a large collection of aircrafts and models related to Norway. They have recently started to display some few vehicles from the Museum of the Armed Force's collection too.
Let's take a look at some of their models too:
Several German aircrafts was left behind after WW2 and entered service in the Royal Norwegian Air Force
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| A larger diorama of the base of the Norwegian squadron based on Iceland during WW2 for maritime operations. One of their missions was allied Convoy protection |
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| Norwegian pilots did not only serve in Norwegian squadrons, but also served in British squadrons during WW2 |
They also have an own re-make of a old larger diorama that used to be exhibited on the Norwegian Armed Forces Museum in Oslo, which was kind of inspiring me to go into model making when I was a kid. The diorama shows a lot of different scenes from a WW2 forwarded airfield on the continent:
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| These markings were based upon Norwegian pre-war markings, but were not approved during WW2. |
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| Ground forces on the firing range... |
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| ...and during basic training. |
This is a model of 'Little Norway' which was training facilities in Canada for the Norwegian Air Force during WW2.
Too bad I forgot to take photos from the Museum Shop this time as they have several kits there, mostly of aircrafts, but some Cobi armored vehicles as well. I bought a couple of 'pencil sharpeners', as they looked about appropriate for wargaming with my miniatures. The figure is for reference only:
So this is how far it's possible to find the Norwegian equivalents to those museums I visited in Finland and Sweden, and I'll guess this concludes my travelling reports this summer. I hope other military modellers, railway modellers and perhaps also wargamers found something interesting in them, or wanting to go seeing some of these places.
