One of the projects completed after the armistice was that providing for railway mounts for forty-seven 8-inch, 35 calibers, seacoast rifles. The two contractors--the Morgan Engineering Company of Alliance, Ohio, and the Harrisburg Manufacturing & Boiler Company of Harrisburg, Pennsylvania--had built eighteen complete units, each consisting of a gun car and numerous accessory ammunition and repair cars, a whole train in itself, and had manufactured all the parts for the rest. These parts were ordered assembled. This purely American mount possesses the advantage of permitting the gun to fire at any angle, the mount revolving upon a barbette carriage, and the disadvantage that in traveling on narrow-gauge track (such as is being laid at isolated places along the coast) its gun must be transferred to a special gun car--a transfer, however, quickly effected by the machinery which the gun train itself carries. Seventy-seven ammunition cars for these guns, built as they were for operation in French railway trains and therefore useless in this country, were sold to the French Government for about $250,000, a price which covered every cent spent in their production. A second project completed after the armistice placed twelve 12-inch guns on French Batignolle railway mounts. This mount absorbs the gun recoil in an enormous hydropneumatic recuperator, permitting rapid fire and the fastening of the gun car to the track to avoid any retrograde movement. (Several of the railway mounts slid backward and had to be restored to aim after each shot.) The 12-inch mount, however, permits only a small traverse swing to the gun, which, for correct aiming, has, therefore, to run upon curved tracks, or epis, as they are called. These mounts were built by the Marion Steam Shovel Company with machinery partly the property of the Government. At the completion of the work this machinery was shipped to the Watertown Arsenal. The final completed project was the mounting of ninety 12-inch mortars (seacoast weapons) upon railway cars. The Morgan Engineering Company built a special plant costing $3,500,000 for this one job, providing mount-building capacity twelve times that of the Watertown Arsenal before 1917--and that arsenal had been the Army’s sole source of big-gun mounts. On November 11, 1918, this plant had manufactured all the parts for all ninety mounts, and the assembling of these mounts was therefore ordered. About 100 ammunition cars of French design were sold to the French Government for about $350,000, thus returning most of the money put into them. The Alliance plant itself was too large and expensive to maintain as a stand-by plant; and, after shipping most of the special-purpose machinery to the Watertown Arsenal, the Ordnance Department disposed of the building to a private buyer.[8]