Window Sticker AMP Bronshofen

[Dreadnought]

I may have asked this before, but does anyone know what the yellow sticker on the inside of my front window (710k) is? It is a yellow background with: AMP Bronshofen written on it in black. I have Googled and searched the interweb worldwide and inside out....I cannot find any reference to it. http://www.flickr.com/photos/pinzgauer710k/page4/ it is in pic 0332.

[Dreadnought]

Will you look at that, never found any reference before, now I just checked again and it stands for ArmeeMotorfahrtzeugPark there is a big speil on the page, could some German fluent person translate for me? http://www.bronschhofen.ch/haupt.asp?ct ... rchiv+2003 Maybe this will give me some clues to the earlier life story of my Pinzgauer. Just the little section that explains about the AMP please. Or was this the disposal Depot? before it was sold out of service.

[Dreadnought]

It gets better, I just found a map of the AMP and you can zoom in. Would those be a lot of Pinzgauers parked there:
http://map.search.ch/bronschhofen/amp-str.4

[Ditchdigger]

Cool stuff! Didnt notice the sticker on my 710.

[edzz]

http://translate.google.com/translate?j ... l=de&tl=en

[acebee]

that's good.. looks like the AMP area near Wil will be preserved for posterity's sake..

[Dreadnought]

Thanks for the translation edzz.......I couldn,t quite get what they were driving at? does it seem that the Big Motor Park is running down? and they feared it becoming a dumping site for old vehicles?
I suppose any Military disposal site will look a bit 'ragged' depending upon how many badly damaged vehicles they have in at any one time.
Plus it will maybe be run mostly by civilians who might not keep it up together like a military base (Looks like one) may have been kept in the past.

[edzz]

- Future Army motor Bronschhofen Park (AMP)
It sounds like the local bureaucrats are making noise indicating that if the AMP is retired from use as (what I take to be) a military vehicle rehab facility, they, the local bureaucrats (aka political wind bags) want to obtain control of the facility to use / develop as they see fit (i.e. in a manner that would provide political or financial benefit to themselves).
Just a guess, I’m assuming that when Swiss elected and appointed officials start taking about doing things for the "good of the community and the voters" they are looking after there own wallet the same as the vast majority of our politicians.
It is possible that I’m just overly suspicious of bureaucratic motivations.

Ed

[Dreadnought]

Edzz I think you are probably correct. So it was a refurbishment centre and now they are running it down. Where money or any kind of power is concerned then all politicians from any country are to be suspected of having motives which will either extend their power or make them richer.

[GenevaPinz]

Hi all,

From what I could read about the translation (thanks for this btw, my german is more than rusty), I think the local politician's concerns are justified. Not that they are better than anywhere else in the world, but they face the same kind of concern than most small communities that host "AMPs" in Switzerland.

Since the end of the Cold War, the Swiss Army and its budget have been shrinking like all the other European armies, maybe even more as neutral Switzerland cannot justify its defense budget with overseas operations. As a consequence, rationalisation means cutting the number of military facilities every now and then, which has consequences for the (usually small) communities that host them.

If you look at the map, the AMP is a big facility compared to the size of Bronschhofen's size, so I can understand that the local politicians want to avoid the two options mentionned:
- leaving it derelict (which google translated as "brownfield"),
- committing it to the collection and sorting of waste (which could be done, reading between the lines, if the Army sells it to the State who would then turn it into a waste collection hub for the region), because of the "not in my backyard" attitude.
Instead, they prefer to have the AMP continue its operations (and keep the jobs) or be turned to the local community for civilian development, with more attractive perspectives than waste collection... (political and financial benefit for the politicians included )

Dreadnought, the Swiss Army does not have (as far as I know) disposal sites where they would keep old vehicles: vehicles being phased out are sold (that's how most of us ended up with a pinz) or recycled / destroyed... the country is too small to have facilities like Davis-Monthan AFB in Arizona

Jan

[Dreadnought]

I do see their point Geneva Pinz, If the place closed that may mean a lot of jobs would go and as you say, in a place that size it may be or may have been at one time the biggest employer. In the UK it used to be that the military were loathe to lose any property they owned. Granted that they were always very well fenced but some did become a blot on the landscape because they became derelict. (There are stories of people going into closed buildings that have been sealed for 30 or more years and finding lights still switched on! But the military here are being forced by the government to give up property and it is being sold off. (No cold war no excuse to keep it) and all of the disposal sites here have been sold off to private companies. http://www.mod-sales.com/ It is still a little bit of history for us Pinzgauer owners, did all Swiss Pinzgauers pass through Bronshofen?

[GenevaPinz]

There were already quite a bunch of AMPs that were closed. I googled a bit further and found that between 2001 and 2010, the army logistics have been trimmed by between 2 thirds and 3 quarters...!

Not all Pinzes went through AMP Bronschhofen, as there were a lot of them depots accross the country (despite its small size), the Cold War concept being that the army could be fully mobilized in 24 hours or so.
When I got my Pinz, there was a document dated 1974 in the glovebox that listed all the AMPs with the corresponding civilian repair shops that had been approved by military authorities to conduct repairs on Pinzes that the AMPs could not handle. The document lists 10 AMPs: Romont, Grolley, Thun, Burgdorf, Othmarsingen, Rothenburg, Hinwil, Bronschhofen, Chur and Bellinzona.

Jan