Thursday, September 10, 2015

Ural-ZiS-355M

From one of my other blogs, VreMax, where I reported on this car exhibition that I visited a year ago - in August of 2014.  

An UralZiS 355 M medium-duty truck seen at that car exhibition.





The 1958-65 UralZiS-355M is a medium-duty truck carrying nominally 3.5 tons (but up to 5 in real life) made at the Urals Auto Plant in the USSR. 

The UralZiS-355M was a new model and not a modernization of the UralZiS-355, itself based on the pre-war UralZiS-5 (the ZiS-5). 

However, certain elements were borrowed from other trucks, such as the cabin. For this reason, it resembles an over-sized GAZ-51.

UralZiS-5 vehicles were used mainly in Kazakhstan and Siberia - close to the seat of manufacture. 

In 1962, a small number of UralZiS-355ME export version trucks were supplied to customers in Afghanistan and Finland. 

Over 192,000 were made during its production run. 

At this time, 20 (or, according to other sources, 12) UralZiS-355M trucks remain in existence (including two operational), and this is one of them.



The UralZiS-355M cement truck appears in the cult Russian film Gentlemen of Fortune, a criminal caper comedy, where the four eponymous "gentlemen of fortune" escape a prison facility in its cement tank.




More period pictures of the UralZiS-355M.









Sources: my photography, wikipedia, auto models website, and UralZiS-355M page on the Sibpromtrans website.

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