Fire Engines Photos

This unit is accompanied by an older Steyr pumper, a Peugeot command truck and a Renault squad utility. This small village has over forty volunteers and also operates a very active youth fire brigade, which is a very good way of insuring future recruitment.

Austria has only six paid fire departments, and relies on a very dense network of fire stations staffed by active unpaid volunteers for fire suppression, with over 95% of all operational firefighters being volunteers.

This structure makes for a disproportionately large market for fire appliances, as every village has a few. This perhaps explains why Austrian Rosenbauer has been able to grow to become one of the World’s largest manufacturers of fire trucks.

MAN acquired Steyr a few years ago, and has since then been very successful replacing the old native Austrian brand with local fire services.

Added by Rob Johnson on 05 February 2025.

In Austrian fire service nomenclature R = rescue, LF = fire engine and 4000 describes the water tank capacity in litres. This is standardized across all public fire service units, so that different specifications and specialized capabilities can be instantly recognized. Just as in other countries with numerous volunteer fire companies, the adoption of rescue pumpers has been rather gradual because the replacement cycle for appliances which get rather infrequent runs tends to be quite long. Thirty and even forty year service lives are not unheard of.

Added by Rob Johnson on 06 February 2025.

After some additional research, I discovered that the Steyr is actually a 16 year old rescue truck, on a 18 ton 4X4 chassis with a three seat cab. It has a rear mounted small crane, and loads of rescue gear - but also has a small water tank and carries a 1000 LPM PP, so it too could be described as a rescue pumper, but with more emphasis on the rescue role. The command van is - also rather unusually - a larger eight seat version, and brings additional members to an incident to compensate for the rather limited accommodations on the rescue truck.

This very unusual Steyr is an example of even small volunteer fire companies in Austria going to quite some pains to specify exactly what they think they best need for the risks they cover in their response areas.

Added by Rob Johnson on 06 February 2025.

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