PITTSBURGH — A fundraising campaign is under way to bring a pair of 66-ton gun barrels removed from the USS Pennsylvania battleship to a central Pennsylvania museum.

The 53-foot barrels sat for decades in a field at the Naval Surface Warfare Center in Dahlgren, Va., waiting to be melted down, until the Navy approved a deal to send them to the Pennsylvania Military Museum in Boalsburg, Centre County.

Built in 1915, the USS Pennsylvania survived Pearl Harbor and a Japanese torpedo. The gun barrels, once capable of hurling a 1,500 pound armor-piercing shell 20 miles in less than a minute, were removed in 1945 during an overhaul and were not on the ship when it was scuttled in 1948.

The 14-inch diameter gun barrels, large enough for a sailor to crawl inside, will be mounted on a concrete cradle built this year with $200,000 in state money.

However, transporting the guns by truck from Virginia will cost another $75,000.

Friends of the Pennsylvania Military Museum, a volunteer group, has so far raised about $25,000. The group had hoped to have the guns mounted by Veterans Day, but the downturn in the economy apparently stalled donations.

Now the museum hopes to have them on display by late spring or early summer, museum director Bill Leech said.

The guns will be part of a larger display outside the museum that will include a stone-and-shrubbery outline of the ship's 612-foot-long hull.