Eddystone Arsenal was a Baldwin Locomotive Works subsidiary located in Eddystone, Pennsylvania that produced military hardware for the Allies of World War I. As orders from combatants exceeded the production capacity of Baldwin's Philadelphia factory, new manufacturing facilities were built in Eddystone, Pennsylvania. When the first world war ended, this manufacturing complex was used for locomotive manufacturing as Baldwin's Eddystone Plant. [1]
Baldwin received locomotive orders from Imperial Russia, France, and the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland as those nations' manufacturing facilities were refocused on armaments production. Baldwin's vice president Samuel M. Vauclain visited Russia in 1914 to obtain orders for thirty 0-6-6-0 Mallet locomotives for the 3 ft 6 in gauge railways between Arkhangelsk and Vologda. This was followed by orders for 2-10-0 Russian gauge locomotives and 75 cm gauge gasoline locomotives for Russian trench railways. France ordered more than one-thousand trench railway locomotives, and the United Kingdom ordered 495 trench railway locomotives and 465 locomotives for standard-gauge railways. [2]
France and the United Kingdom then placed orders with Baldwin for artillery shells of calibers from 12 centimetres (4.7 in) to 12 inches (30 cm). Although Baldwin's Philadelphia plant was enlarged to include a 4-story extension to the truck shop and a new 8-story building, completion of ammunition orders required construction of new manufacturing facilities at Eddystone, where Baldwin had been operating a shop since 1905. Baldwin formed the Eddystone Ammunition Corporation on 10 June 1915 to manufacture 2,500,000 3-inch (76 mm) shrapnel shells of Russian design. The Eddystone Ammunition plant adjacent to the Delaware River was operational by November 1915 including a modern wharf along the river front. This plant was the source of the Eddystone explosion which killed 133 people on 10 April 1917. Another Baldwin subsidiary, the Eddystone Munitions Company, was organized on 27 September 1917 to manufacture shrapnel for the United States government. Total production was 6,565,355 artillery shells before the plant was converted to locomotive shops in 1919. [3]
On 30 April 1915 the United Kingdom placed a contract with Remington Arms for 1,500,000 Pattern 1914 Enfield rifles. When Remington subcontracted the bulk of this order to Baldwin, Baldwin built a 14-acre (5.7 ha) rifle plant at Eddystone, the largest factory in the United States during World War I. This Eddystone Rifle Plant began production on 31 December 1915 with 10,000 machines powered by 424,000 feet (129,000 m) of belting from 40,200 feet (12,300 m) of line shafts. The rifle plant employed 15,294 workers, with women accounting for 20 percent of the peak work force, manufacturing up to 6,000 rifles per day. Rifle plant operations ceased on 11 January 1919 after producing 1,959,954 rifles with spare parts equivalent to 200,000 more rifles. Contract changes resulted in most rifles being completed to the modified M1917 Enfield design, which was carried by nearly two-thirds of the American Expeditionary Forces. [4]
A shotgun is a firearm that is usually designed to be fired from the shoulder, which uses the energy of a fixed shell to fire a number of small spherical pellets called shot, or a solid projectile called a slug. Shotguns come in a wide variety of sizes, ranging from 5.5 mm (.22 inch) bore up to 5 cm (2.0 in) bore, and in a range of firearm operating mechanisms, including breech loading, single-barreled, double or combination gun, pump-action, bolt-, and lever-action, revolver, semi-automatic, and even fully automatic variants.
Shrapnel shells were anti-personnel artillery munitions which carried many individual bullets close to the target and then ejected them to allow them to continue along the shell's trajectory and strike the target individually. They relied almost entirely on the shell's velocity for their lethality. The munition has been obsolete since the end of World War I for anti-personnel use, when it was superseded by high-explosive shells for that role. The functioning and principles behind Shrapnel shells are fundamentally different from high-explosive shell fragmentation. Shrapnel is named after Major-General Henry Shrapnel (1761–1842), a British artillery officer, whose experiments, initially conducted on his own time and at his own expense, culminated in the design and development of a new type of artillery shell.
Eddystone is a borough in Delaware County, Pennsylvania, United States. The population was 2,410 at the 2010 census.
The Baldwin Locomotive Works (BLW) was an American manufacturer of railroad locomotives from 1825 to 1956. Originally located in Philadelphia, it moved to nearby Eddystone, Pennsylvania, in the early 20th century. The company was for decades the world's largest producer of steam locomotives, but struggled to compete as demand switched to diesel locomotives. Baldwin produced the last of its 70,000-plus locomotives in 1956 and went out of business in 1972.
John TaliaferroThompson was a United States Army officer best remembered as the inventor of the Thompson submachine gun.
Under the Whyte notation for the classification of steam locomotives, 2-10-0 represents the wheel arrangement of two leading wheels on one axle, ten powered and coupled driving wheels on five axles, and no trailing wheels. This arrangement was often named Decapod, especially in the United States, although this name was sometimes applied to locomotives of 0-10-0 "Ten-Coupled" arrangement, particularly in the United Kingdom. Notable German locomotives of this type include the war locomotives of Class 52.
Remington Arms Company, LLC is an American manufacturer of firearms and ammunition. It was founded in 1816 by Eliphalet Remington in Ilion, New York, as E. Remington and Sons. Remington is America's oldest gun maker and is claimed to be America's oldest factory that still makes its original product. Remington is the largest U.S. producer of shotguns and rifles. The company has developed or adopted more cartridges than any other gun maker or ammunition manufacturer in the world.
The Geo D. Whitcomb Company was founded by George Dexter Whitcomb (1834–1914), of Chicago, Illinois, who started a modest machine shop in 1878, and began the manufacture of coal mining machinery, laying the foundation for the concern that became known as The Whitcomb Locomotive Company.
Savage Arms is a gunmaker based in Westfield, Massachusetts, with operations in Canada. Savage makes a variety of rimfire and centerfire rifles, as well as Stevens single-shot rifles and shotguns. The company is best known for the Model 99 lever-action rifle, no longer in production, and the .300 Savage. Savage was a subsidiary of Vista Outdoor until 2019 when it was spun off.
The Krag–Petersson was the first repeating rifle adopted by the armed forces of Norway and was one of the first repeating rifles to be adopted as standard issue by a military force, being preceded by the Swiss Vetterli adopted in 1867. Developed by Ole Herman Johannes Krag, the action of the Krag–Petersson was uniquely actuated by an oversized hammer. Another distinguishing feature was that the cartridge rising from the magazine was not seated automatically, but had to be pushed into the breech of the rifle.
Under the Whyte notation for the classification of steam locomotives by wheel arrangement, 4-6-0 represents the configuration of four leading wheels on two axles in a leading bogie and six powered and coupled driving wheels on three axles with the absence of trailing wheels. In the mid 19th century, this wheel arrangement became the second most popular configuration for new steam locomotives in the United States of America, where this type is commonly referred to as a Ten-wheeler. As a locomotive pulling trains of lightweight all wood passenger cars in the 1890-1920s, it was exceptionally stable at near 100 mph speeds on the New York Central's New York to Chicago Water Level Route and on the Reading Railroad's Camden to Atlantic City, NJ, line. As passenger equipment grew heavier with all steel construction, heavier locomotives replaced the Ten Wheeler.
The War Department Light Railways were a system of narrow gauge trench railways run by the British War Department in World War I. Light railways made an important contribution to the Allied war effort in the First World War, and were used for the supply of ammunition and stores, the transport of troops and the evacuation of the wounded.
The Mount Gretna Narrow Gauge Railway was a 2 ft narrow-gauge line of the Cornwall and Lebanon Railroad in the state of Pennsylvania that operated between 1889 and 1916. The Cornwall and Lebanon Railroad earlier had established a station and picnic ground at Mount Gretna.
The Shell Crisis of 1915 was a shortage of artillery shells on the front lines in the First World War that led to a political crisis in the United Kingdom. The military historian Hew Strachan wrote that military strategy led an over-reliance on shrapnel to attack infantry in the open, which was negated by the resort to trench warfare, for which high-explosive shells were better suited. At the start of the war there was a revolution in doctrine: instead of the idea that artillery was a useful support for infantry attacks, the new doctrine held that heavy guns alone would control the battlefield. Because of the stable lines on the Western Front, it was easy to build railway lines that delivered all the shells the factories could produce. The "shell scandal" emerged in 1915 because the high rate of fire over a long period was not anticipated and the stock of shells became depleted.
The M1917 Enfield, the "American Enfield", formally named "United States Rifle, cal .30, Model of 1917" is an American modification and production of the .303-inch Pattern 1914 Enfield (P14) rifle developed and manufactured during the period 1917–1918. Numerically, it was the main rifle used by the American Expeditionary Forces in Europe during World War I. The Danish Sirius Dog Sled Patrol on Greenland still use the M1917, which performs reliably in Arctic conditions, as their service weapon.
The Rifle, .303 Pattern 1914 was a British service rifle of the First World War period. A bolt action weapon with an integral 5-round magazine, it was principally contract manufactured by companies in the United States. It served as a sniper rifle and as second line and reserve issue until being declared obsolete in 1947. The Pattern 1914 Enfield was the successor to the Pattern 1913 Enfield experimental rifle and the predecessor of the U.S. Rifle M1917 Enfield.
Trench railways represented military adaptation of early 20th century railway technology to the problem of keeping soldiers supplied during the static trench warfare phase of World War I. The large concentrations of soldiers and artillery at the front lines required delivery of enormous quantities of food, ammunition and fortification construction materials where transport facilities had been destroyed. Reconstruction of conventional roads and railways was too slow, and fixed facilities were attractive targets for enemy artillery. Trench railways linked the front with standard gauge railway facilities beyond the range of enemy artillery. Empty cars often carried litters returning wounded from the front.
The Russian locomotive class Ye, and subclasses Yea, Yek, Yel, Yef, Yem, Yemv and Yes were a series of 2-10-0 locomotives built by American builders for the Russian railways in World War I and again in World War II. They were lightweight engines with relatively low axle loadings.
The .276 Enfield (7×60mm) was an experimental rebated rim bottlenecked centerfire military rifle cartridge developed in conjunction with the Pattern 1913 Enfield (P'13) rifle. Development was discontinued by the onset of World War I.
On April 10, 1917, four days after the United States declared war on Germany, an explosion at the Eddystone Ammunition Corporation's artillery shell plant in Eddystone, Pennsylvania, killed 139 people. The majority were women and girls who worked in the loading room, loading shells with black powder. 55 of the victims could not be identified and were buried in a mass grave. Hundreds more were injured. The victims were arguably among the first American casualties of World War I.