Nystrup's Last Crawler Tractor (1/35)

Nystrup Gravel used a Soviet built crawler tractor for pulling machinery and cut down trees from the areas to be quarried. The S-65 was huge and unpractical, but it was bought cheap and in the 1950's you had to use what you could get your hands on, as machinery was under import restrictions. When restrictions lifted somewhat Nystrup Gravel managed to buy a much smaller Ransomes crawler tractor from the United Kingdom.

The Ransomes type MG6 was introduced in 1953 but I don't know when Nystrup Gravel got hold of their's. Here the tiny tractor is photographed outside the loco shed at Nystrup. 

The MG6 was the first crawler tractor I ever built a model of. I assembled a Model Tractor Co. 1:32 kit of a MG6 in 1994 and recently went over it again with some paint and weathering. As with any Model Tractor kit the MG6 is of whitemetal with a small number of etched brass parts. I left off the three point linkage at the rear of the tractor and fitted a protective steel plate with heavy coupling and chain for hauling tasks.

Fuelling of Nystrup Gravel's wheeled or tracked vehicles were usually done from jerry cans. Here the MG6 has been driven to the loco fuelling site. Had 'Stalin' done that, the track would probably have needed repair.

The Ransomes MG6 was a small crawler tractor designed to operate on small orchards and market gardens. They were often fitted with power take-off drive and hydraulic three-point linkage. The first model of the Ransomes crawler, the MG2 was released in 1936. A total of about 15,000 Ransomes MG series tractors were built - 4800 were MG6s. The MG6 was Nystrup's last crawler tractor. It was last seen during the clean up after the close down of the company in the late 1970's, probably ending up as scrap.