This is a closer view of the German 11" World War I railway gun described in image 2151.

The gun itself is a 28 cm SK (German for "quick loading cannon") L/40 "Bruno". The L/40 refers to the calibre (length) of the barrel; remember that unlike in handguns, in artillery pieces the calibre expresses the length of the barrel as a multiple of the internal diameter... more or less, without turning this into a treatise on ballistics.

These were originally naval guns which were fitted to the Braunschweig and Deutschland classes of pre-Dreadnought battleships, but after the Battle of Jutland those were relegated to training duties and some of their guns were redesigned to be land based, railway mounted guns.

(This one is believed to have come originally from the SMS Hessen, a Braunschweig class pre-Dreadnought from 1902, but that's not certain.)

The gun required some huge, heavy and robust mountings to operate it, as well as massive and equally robust rail bogies to move it. It was originally captured, shipped to Australia and displayed (initially in Eddy Avenue alongside Central Railway station) with those. It moved to Canberra in 1923, but not to the War Memorial; instead the gun, its mounts and its rail carriages sat on a spur railway line on the way to Canberra station.

During World War II, the gun was requested by the Department of Munitions for testing the mount with allied guns.

After the war, it went back to being a museum piece but the problem was that the mountings and railway bogies were too large to move up to the grounds of the AWM for display. (The length of the barrel itself is about 10.4 metres (34' 1"), but the whole unit including mounting is 21.6 metres - so over twice as long as this - and it weighed 156 tonnes. So you see the problem.)

In the end (that end being the early 1960s) both the frame and the bogies were broken up for scrap and the barrel alone was put on display.

This gun is also known as the "Amiens Gun" because as I mentioned in the previous shot Amiens was the principal city in the Somme region. It was thus one of the gun's principal targets.

Given that it's German, it almost goes without saying that it was designed and manufactured by Krupp.