Exhibits
The museum features a 50,000-square-foot (4,600 m2) main building and four outdoor parks.
The exhibits inside the museum building include representative transportation-related materials, presented in a series of dioramas in chronological order. Outside (see map, below) there is a vehicle yard to the south, with road vehicles, amphibious craft, and the aircraft pavilion, and a rail exhibit to the north. Although material is presented on 18th- and 19th-century topics, over half the indoor exhibit space and almost all of the outdoor exhibits are 20th-century- related.
Early truck developments are given coverage with the Mexican Punitive Expedition, Liberty truck, and Transcontinental Motor Convoy exhibits. The extensive Liberty Truck exhibit covers the development and production of the Army's first standardized truck design, a 5 ton cargo hauler produced using interchangeable parts as well as soldier letters about their experiences with the trucks.
World War II receives coverage with several exhibits. Among them are coverage of Operation Mulberry, which was an operation to construct two artificial harbors on the Normandy coast to support the invasion. This operation used 158 tugboats including 74 of the Army's "small tugs" to tow 59 Gooseberry derelict ships to be sunk as breakwalls and the Phoenix caissons and Lobnitz floating piers. Another exhibit focuses on the Red Ball Express, the massive supply operation that supported Patton's advance after D-Day. Coverage includes photos and paintings of the trucks as well as a diorama of a rest stop/repair depot featuring cargo trucks and a wrecker. Additional materials address the massive fuel and oil consumption needs as well as soldier experiences.
The museum has an extensive Vietnam War exhibit, including a large diorama with the gun truck Eve of Destruction (believed the only surviving Vietnam era gun truck, and named after a protest song) and a helicopter, as well as bicycles used by the Viet Cong. The museum has an extensive collection of gun truck images, organised by the truck name, which are also on the museum's web site.
Outdoor exhibits include the vehicle park with a selection of representative vehicles used in the transport command. A marine park has Army water vessels, including a DUKW and a tugboat and various sized amphibious craft including landing craft and wheeled barges.
The aviation pavilion exhibits aircraft, fixed wing and helicopter, from the Korean War to the present, including a HZ-1 Aerocycle, an OH-23 Raven helicopter and a vertical take-off/landing plane. An unrestored Avrocar is in the covered section.
The rail section has several significant artifacts including the railway cars used in the Berlin duty train as well as standard issue tank switchers, and a collection of typical rolling stock including cranes, freight cars and maintenance of way equipment.
Read more about this topic: U.S. Army Transportation Museum
Famous quotes containing the word exhibits:
“After all the field of battle possesses many advantages over the drawing-room. There at least is no room for pretension or excessive ceremony, no shaking of hands or rubbing of noses, which make one doubt your sincerity, but hearty as well as hard hand-play. It at least exhibits one of the faces of humanity, the former only a mask.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“It exhibits the effort of an essentially prosaic mind to lift itself, by a prolonged muscular strain, into poetry.”
—Henry James (1843–1916)
“Uncritical semantics is the myth of a museum in which the exhibits are meanings and the words are labels. To switch languages is to change the labels.”
—Willard Van Orman Quine (b. 1908)