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 Dan Rowbottom's model of
Btry. Way

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LARGER SCANS ARE AVAILABLE ONLY ON THE CD-RM

Dan Rowbottom of Coastal Defense Study Group and Site O, using drawings from CDSG materials and photos from a number of sources, including this page, has built a museum model of Battery Way. He has fabricated the guns from resin kits which he has built himself. Nice work Dan. But it looks too new and clean. 

The model is built to look as Battery Way could have looked a few years after the additional top protection was added, or as it was in the 1920's.

As originally built,  Btty. Way only had two feet of concrete for a roof and three foot thick exterior walls.  The additional protection included enlarging the magazines. The pit wall in the photo was thickened from three feet up to six feet, and both magazine roofs received an additional six feet of concrete togethet with an additional twelve feet of earth.

As well, the exterior walls were covered to the height of the roofs.

 

Looking into the battery from above the three foot narrow gage rail line. The railroad was how everything on the island was moved. In the magazine entrance are the shot tables, the real ones of which have long ago been scrapped. These were used to transfer the twelve inch shells from the overhead trolley in the magazine to the shot cars outside. The I-beams above the shot tables lifted the shot from the railcars to the shot tables, and thence to fill the magazines.
The plotting and communications building behind the mortars converted target information from spotters  into azimuth, elevation and propellent charge data for the mortars. A shrouded floodlight is on each side of the building to assist the night working of the mortars.
The Latrine is in the foreground and the plotting room is across the entrance to the pit. Both buildings had gas-proof entrances added, but no roof protection was added due to budgetary constraints. The trees on the front right of the photograph which hide the right magazine are on the only unchanged ground around the battery. If you add twenty years of growth, it would be very difficult to find indeed. 
Battery Way is a later designed pit with lots of working space. The short spacing on the left and back of the pit has occurred because of the three feet of wall added to the left magazine and rear. Some early designs in the U.S. had only a foot between the mortars and a foot or so to the pit walls. This made for very cramped working of the mortars.
The three white squares are additional lights for night working of the mortars. Left mortar is down level in the loading position, ready to fire. The manhole between the mortars is for electrical firing of the mortars.

 

 

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H Version 09.09.11

Model & Text by Dan Rowbottom