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As visitors approach the U.S. Army Engineer Museum at Fort Leonard Wood, Missouri, they will see the facility's newest restoration project, a mobile assault bridge (MAB) acquired in 1987, shortly after the U.S. Army Engineer School stopped teaching MAB operations. For a decade, the bridge sat near the main museum building, where the U.S. Army Military Police and Chemical Museums now stand. When those museums eventually moved to Fort Leonard Wood in the late 1990s, the MAB was placed in storage. In 2014, the museum staff and the craftsmen of the Fort Leonard Wood Logistics Readiness Center began restoring the bridge. Following two long years of work, the renovated MAB was installed in its current location.
In 1959, MAB was developed by the U.S. Army Engineer Research and Development Laboratories at Fort Belvoir, Virginia. The first batch of MABs was produced and delivered to the Army between 1963 and 1967. This version of the MAB, which had riveted hulls, was manufactured by one company in California and by another in New York. The MAB was constructed with...