200 yard Moving Target Ranges

Excellent drawings Paul.

I'm no longer convinced about Hell's Mouth being the Pathe News location, as the hangars are definitely wrong. Strangely AIR10/4038 states three Bellmans, as does the 1944 Site Plan, However the 1942 vertical appears to show four.

Millom has three in a line but the spacing isn't quite right.
Any further suggestions, guys?

Graham

Unless we find another range with that additional wall then Hell's Mouth seems to be the most likely contender.

Here's a couple of stills showing the target on the track on what would at HM be alongside the western arm of wall W2, with the camera facing northwards. (What could be the Workshop Shelter and turret apron is visible to the right of the hangars in the first still):




Looking at the HM aerial photo, could the two hangars visible not be the two southwestern ones? They are pretty much at the right bearing.


Moving further around the range, here's the banking of the Firing Shelter/Wall W1, admittedly fairly standard to most of the MTRs, in the background, W2 in the centre and W3 in the foreground:



The camera keeps tracking left......
Wall W3 is still in the foreground.
Wall W2 can be seen behind the target model, heading off to the right, and what appears to be the "Hell's Mouth Additional Wall" comes into shot on the left hand side behind W2, with the trackbed just visible between them:



Now if we could only sort that large dune behind W1 and what appears to be a hill behind the hangars in the first shot we'd be laughing......

All the best,
PB

Not that I was bored or owt, but here's a quick and nasty panorama looking downrange

The latest updates on the Snettisham Range have been added to its own thread HERE .

Musings.....

If Theddlethorpe was the first 200yd MTR built, could Snettisham have been the last?
It's certainly the most basic, with simple shingle banks without reinforcing walls.
Then there's the unique track layout, with the target "garage" with inspection pit being beside the firing platform.
There's no third rail visible in the wartime photo of the track, so how was the target trolley powered?
Come to that, where was the target trolley controlled from, as there's no cabin straddling the track as at the other MTRs?

Uuuuugh, so may questions thrown up by this range.

TTFN,
PB

Paul

one question that occurs to me is who built the MTR range at Snettisham? If it was the US, would they not draw on thier own experience of jeep ranges? or simply adapt British designs.

I get the impression that the 200yd MTR was built for the RAF, whether they used it before it was handed over to the USAAF I'm unsure.
I was hoping the two .30 Cal rounds I found on the banking were .303 when I first spotted them, as that would help clear the matter up.

The adjacent simplified range can be seen to be incomplete in the AAF photos, so seems have been built by/for them.

Hopefully the files on order from AFHRA will sort things out when they arrive.

TTFN,
PB

Someone must have looked at the 200 yard range design with the protected target house downrange and thought why can't it be simpler?

It is likely that the carriage supporting the target was now powered by an on-board internal combustion engine started from it's new location adjacent to the firing point and stopped - when required - by a hand operated trip lever leaving it to coast to a halt.

That's my theory:-D