Rail Guns That Actually Work

Added: 2026-05-10

[00:00:05]Hi, I'm Ryan Szimanski, curator for Battleship New Jersey Museum and Memorial. And today, we're at the Washington Navy Yard at the headquarters of Naval History and Heritage Command to look at one of the larger artifacts that's going to end up in the National Museum of the United States Navy one day. And today, I'm joined by Admiral Sam Cox, who is the director of Naval History and Heritage Command, the branch of the Navy that's responsible for all the Navy's history, artifacts, collections, artwork, that sort of stuff. So, what can you tell us about this object?

[00:00:38]Well, this is a World War I railroad gun.

[00:00:42]It was Navy built, Navy operated, Navy manned, but the ones that actually went overseas during the war were ashore.

[00:00:52]And it was a very rapid turnaround between the time somebody had the idea to build this thing until the time it was actually fielded. So, it's an example to to people today of how fast you can do something if you really want to do it in a hurry. But, it was like February, the idea, and it was deployed by July and operational on the Western Front in August. And the earliest versions of it could not traverse at all. So, they had to in order to use it at a target, you had to build a railroad spur that faced at the target. And then, the original ones had an elevation so that you would have to dig a hole, you know, underneath it in order to elevate the gun. So, the later models fixed that, had some traverse, and and you didn't have to dig a hole. But, they were very very effective, very precise. Germans had no idea it was coming, although they had their own version, you know, Big Bertha on on the Western Front. But, it was a pretty cool pretty cool weapon system.

[00:01:59]That is pretty incredible to me. Germans are winning the artillery duel with their long-range artillery, which means that marshalling yards, supplies, groups of troops getting ready to go on the offensive are under bombardment way behind the trenches.

[00:02:13]So, when the United States enters the war, they're able to very rapidly do this. And it's really incredible to me that that's how the US Navy ends up on the Western Front.

[00:02:22]>> Yeah. Because they have artillery like this. It's the same kind of 14-in gun that's on the New Mexico and Tennessee class battleships.

[00:02:30]So, the Navy had spares of those guns for swapping out on those battleships if they needed their guns re-lined.

[00:02:37]And so, because they're trying to do it real quick, they took those existing barrels.

[00:02:42]And who who made the train situation?

[00:02:45]How How'd they get it mounted to the train?

[00:02:47]How'd they get it mounted to the train?

[00:02:48]Well, I don't know.

[00:02:51]You'll have to cut that part out. But, yeah, no. I mean, they were shipped, you know, overseas, assembled in major things once they got over there. And then, you know, once you put it on a railroad, it could go wherever the railroad goes.

[00:03:07]But, it was a, you know, Navy detachment, Lieutenant JG in charge of each of the guns. I think there were only about six of them in a total. But, uh And there was actually an admiral who was in charge of the whole whole operation.

[00:03:23]But, uh Yeah. It was really interesting to me to hear that these guns weren't used as a battery as as like a group of guns firing together, but they were parceled out to different parts of the line where they were needed.

[00:03:37]Just cuz there were so few of them.

[00:03:41]You know, the gun has been out here for many, many years.

[00:03:44]And it went through a period of, you know, entropy always wins. You know, the decay occurred.

[00:03:51]And there was a time being where this was like about the worst eyesore, you know, on the base. And we're right across from a couple three-star admiral headquarters here who could look out their window and see it. So, we finally were able to scrape enough money together to do the restoration on it.

[00:04:10]And it's not it's not cheap to do something like that, especially on an artifact that that's that big. But, she's looking really good right now. And we'll tend to keep her that way.

[00:04:22]Not sure whether it'll ever move up to the the National Museum or we will have the we call this the petting zoo. You know, as as part of the cuz there's a submarine sale over there and 16-in gun and other things out here.

[00:04:37]And this will be kind of an adjunct to the National Museum cuz moving that thing would be major major issue since there is no railroad track in the museum.

[00:04:49]I used to uh You know, when I was on active duty back in the early 2000s, there was a lot of talk about, you know, rail gun. Mhm.

[00:04:58]And that this was going to revolutionize, you know, naval warfare. And I And now I go, "Rail gun, what's the big deal? I already got one."

[00:05:07]But, they're actually talking about electromagnetic rail gun. But, I do like to say, "We already got a rail gun here." And it works.

[00:05:17]My absolute favorite fun fact about the US Navy manned rail guns is American battleships only had armor-piercing shells up until 1942.

[00:05:27]The 16-in guns like on the Iowa-class battleships, there there weren't armor-piercing shells for those during the interwar period.

[00:05:36]But, the 14-in gun had them because they made high-capacity rounds. They were called bombardment rounds specifically for these railroad guns. So, during the interwar years, the US Navy's 14-in battleship guns were the only ones that had high-capacity rounds.

[00:05:52]Really shows you that the Navy wasn't thinking about the shore bombardment role that they would be fulfilling when World War II came around.

[00:06:00]The Washington Navy Yard is a fitting home for this railroad gun because it was originally made here. The gun itself was made right here at the Washington Navy Yard, where so many of the battleship gun barrels were made.

[00:06:13]The chassis for it and a lot of the other service cars that went along with this were made by by Baldwin Locomotive and then shipped in pieces to France, where they were then assembled. So, in addition to the gun car that you see here, there would have, of course, been a train pulling it. There would have been cars filled with ammunition. And there would have been sleeper cars and other spaces like that for the sailors assigned to this gun on the Western Front.

[00:06:40]Another really cool thing about this gun is that, unlike on the battleship, where you've got 60-hp motors or 300-hp motors operating the rotation, the elevation, all those features, the rammers that are associated with the 16-in guns, everything for this 14-in railroad gun is manually operated. This is a fully crew-served weapon.

[00:07:05]I'll thank you for joining us today, Admiral Cox. This is a really cool artifact that you have here.

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