The armistice cut short the joint Franco-American project to mount thirty-six American seacoast 10-inch guns upon the Schneider railway mount, a French design, America to produce the parts for the mounts and France to assemble them. Four complete sets of parts had been sent to France before the armistice. The contractors were three: the Harrisburg Manufacturing & Boiler Company (mounts), the Pullman Car Company (trucks for the gun cars), and the American Car & Foundry Company (ammunition cars). The weapon is not ideal for coastal defense, because the mount allows no traverse aiming, and the car therefore must be used on curved track. The contractors were permitted to finish eighteen of these mounts in all. A gigantic piece of ordnance was the 16-inch howitzer mounted on a railway truck during the war. In a project to build sixty-one such weapons by the year 1920 the Government spent $6,000,000 on a special plant at the mill of the Midvale Steel Company near Philadelphia. The whole project was abandoned after the armistice, but one building had been erected and the structural steel for the rest of the plant was on the ground. Meanwhile the toolmakers of the country were working on the vast projected manufacturing equipment for this plant; and a small amount of this machinery was completed after the armistice and sent to Watervliet and Watertown arsenals. The Neville Island Gun Plant was projected in 1918 as a source of supply for guns of the largest size for mounting upon railway cars. The plant, which was to cost $150,000,000, a sum which would have made it by far the largest gun plant in the world, was expected to manufacture over 450 guns of the biggest sizes during 1919 and 1920--more railway guns than the Germans owned altogether. The enterprise, which was entirely abandoned after the armistice, cost the Government about $9,000,000. Every ordnance officer, however, believes that the mere project, actively started, had its effect in ending the war by depressing the enemy morale. The war cost us about $50,000,000 a day. If, therefore, the Neville project shortened the war by as much as three days, it wrote off its entire estimated cost. The project, immature though it was when terminated, placed in the war reserves certain steel-working machinery of the heaviest sort. One 6,500-ton forging press, costing $500,000, was completed and turned over to the Navy Department for installation in the navy gun-forging plant at Charleston, West Virginia. Certain costly shell-making machinery was completed after the armistice and either sold to private buyers (at favorable prices, as compared with what the Ordnance Department could have obtained for the unfinished machines) or else stored at the Watertown Arsenal.