ITALERI STEYR RSO

Wheeled trucks & half-tracks just couldn’t overcome the state of Russia’s roads, so the German High Command soon started to request a dedicated tracked transporter. The German company, Steyr, put forward a design based on their proven 1.5tonne 1500A truck design.

The vehicle featured: a similar cab, a V8 power-plant boasting 85hp, a ground clearance of 55cm & a suspension arrangement of 4 four pressed steel road wheels per side mounted on elliptical springs. As per the spec, the vehicles were fully tracked & performed well in Russia's muddy terrain.

The Raupenschlepper Ost, or RSO, for short makes for an interesting model. With the release of a 1:35th scale kit recently brought to market by Dragon (Ref: 6691), it seemed only fitting that this workhorse should grace our pages.

We built Italeri’s venerable old RSO (Ref. 227) some years ago. It was just as appealing a proposition then as it is now. It’s a great little kit & Italeri acquired the original moulds from Peerless years before. Moulded in the dark green plastic typical of the era, it builds up pretty well out of the box.

You could go to town with photoetch to spruce up the cab & cargo bed details but we concentrated on the Achilles heel of the Steyr, the kit-supplied rubber tracks. These have to go & are virtually unusable. Instead of buying metal tracks we used Accurate Armour Traxpax. These resin tracks are bent into shape using a hairdryer.

Otherwise, it was painted in a suitable camo scheme using enamels. Other than the silvering of some of the decals, notably the width & dimension markings, if came out pretty well.

The most fun part was filling that wooden cargo deck with plenty of payload, based mainly around a Verlinden Productions accessory set. Now all we have to do is take our remaining Italeri RSO out of the stash & by way of a comparison, build it up alongside the new Dragon release.