In person, the LARC-LX is a monster. In footage, it’s a monster. The scale at which the amphibious mobile barge appears isn’t hampered by anything…it’s huge with whatever expletive fits your speech pattern. It’s twenty-six and a half feet wide, stands nineteen feet six inches high, is 62.5 feet long, required a five-man crew, could pack up to 200 people in the cargo area, and as for weight, you are looking at a nice, round 100 tons. Rated for 60 tons of cargo capacity, the LARC-LX could theoretically pack in up to 100 tons if needed. Were the waves breaking on the beach? No worries, the LARC-LX could take it. Needed to hustle a tank from a ship to shore? Drive it on. Need to flatten the Honda Civic with the annoying sound system owned by the neighbor two doors down? Well…it’ll get the job done, no question, but even if all of the LARC-LXs still exist (they were fully decommissioned in 2001), everybody and their mother is going to notice the fact that you are using a rolling city block to turn a sound system on wheels into a flattened soda can.

The Lane Motor Museum in Nashville, Tennessee has LARC-LX #8 parked behind their main building. Haley and I went to the museum a few years ago and didn’t realize that you had to walk down the hallway with the windows to fully take scale of the machine. We then made our way outside and I promise you, when you stand next to a tire that has three feet of height on your own frame, things get put into perspective real fast. When the Lane Motor Museum acquired the LARC-LX, they had to ship it to the Port of Nashville, restore the four diesel engines and the systems needed for operation, then had to drive the sucker through Nashville late at night to the museum directly. Imagine leaving a restaurant later on at night and seeing that spectacle!