Burton upon Trent, Staffordshire: Tractor to Tank

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When the early Landship developments began in 1915 under Winston Churchill, experiments were carried out with Pedrail machines. Twelve of these machines were ordered in March 1915. The contract for the gearing was awarded to McEwan, Pratt & Co of Burton-upon-Trent. The leading gear engineer at the time was Lieutenant Walter Wilson, who was later one of the two men ultimately responsible for designing the tank. Wilson worked on the gearing for the Landship Pedrails with McEwan, Pratt. When the experiments began to evaluate track designs for the eventual tank, the Bullock tractors from Chicago were shipped to McEwan, Pratt’s. The two tractors were then hitched back-to-back for further experiments, which were carried out in the Burton area. It was a totally pointless test because it had not occurred to anyone that the forward and reverse gears of the two tractors did not match and they simply worked against each other. Location: Burton-upon-Trent, Staffordshire DE14 2EB Image: Tractor experiment, courtesy of IWM