It has been built under the direct supervision of the War Department, and was specifically planned so that it might in time, or case of need, become one of the main munition-distribution centres for all the Allies. Small arms and ammunition are stored and dispensed there, while big guns go direct from French factories.
Regiments of mechanical and technical experts were constantly being recruited in America for this work, and they were sent by the thousands every month of the first year. Maintenance of the ordnance-base alone requires 450 officers and 16,000 men.
Included in the arsenal and ordnance-depot are a gun-repair shop, equipped to reline more than 800 guns a month, a carriage-repair plant of large capacity, a motor-vehicle repair-shop, able to overhaul more than 1,200 cars a month, a small-arms repair-shop, ready to deal with 58,000 small arms and machine-guns a month, a shop for the repair of horse and infantry equipment, and a reloading-plant, capable of reloading 100,000 artillery-cartridges each day.
The assembling-shops in connection with the railroad were built on a commensurate scale. Even in an incomplete state one shop was able to turn out twenty-odd freight-cars a day, of three different designs, and at a neighboring point a plant for assembling the all-steel cars was making one full train a day. The locomotives were assembled in still a third place. This will have turned out 1,100 locomotives, built and shipped flat from America, at the end of its present contract. Already a third of this work has been done.
And there were, of course, the necessary number of roundhouses, and the like, to complete the organization of the self-sufficient railroad.
Not far away was a tremendous assembling and repair plant for airplanes, the operators of which had all been trained in the French factories, so that they knew the planes to the last inner bolthead.
The last assembly-plant was far from least in picturesqueness. It was for the construction, from numbered pieces shipped from Switzerland, of 3,500 wooden barracks, each about 100 feet long by 20 wide, and of double thickness for protection against French weather.
Copyright by the Committee on Public Information.
U. S. locomotive-assembling yards in France.