It was a brutally cold November of 1941. The Nazis were at the outskirts of Moscow, preparing for the all-in assault on the Soviet capital. At the same moment, in a small town of Irbit, located on the eastern slopes of the Ural Mountains, 2000kms away from Moscow, a freight train arrived with the machinery, materials, and drawing boards. With this train came people with an impossible task to build a factory in the middle of a Siberian winter and produce combat sidecar motorcycles for the Red Army.
The first M72's built by the Irbit Factory were sent to the front lines in February of 1942 and were used by the troops in the Battle of Stalingrad.
After the war the factory continued producing motorcycles with sidecars and built over 3 million outfits. People who laid the foundation of the factory would have never imagined that 70 years later this factory would remain the only sidecar motorcycle manufacturer in the world and Ural would become a cult motorcycle.
Very cool,
ReplyDeleteI had no idea Ural was THAT old. While their design is obviously not new, 70 years is a long time to be in the biz. Way to go to them.
Brady
Behind Bars - Motorcycles and Life
www.behindbarsmotorcycle.com
Very, very cool. I would love to get ahold of one of these.
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