This war required the quick transport of men
on a scale never before seen.
Millions of men had to be moved from their homes to the battlefronts, and in 1914 the
quickest and most effective way to do that was by train.
I’m Indy Neidell; welcome to a Great War
special episode about trains during the First World War.
Time has been “a” or even “the” key
factor in every war in history.
If you can gather and deploy your troops more
quickly than your enemy, you have a pretty serious advantage.
The first military use of the railway was in 1839 when it was integrated into a Prussian
maneuver, but the first real railway action was in the Franco-Austrian war of 1859 when
around 9,000 men and horses were transported by rail per day.
The American Civil War saw train artillery, armored trains, and railway hospitals on supply
lines that could be hundreds of kilometers long.
Many saw the lightning quick deployment by train of Prussians during the Franco-Prussian
War as the decisive factor in that conflict; in ten days the German railway system moved
half a million men and 150,000 horses to the French border.
For the German Empire from its formation, it was essential to be able to quickly move
troops from one end it to the other because its geographical position left it surrounded
by potential enemies.
Consequently, the German army was the first to have dedicated railway battalions, who
not only operated trains, but were also trained to assemble and repair them.
They were familiar with every piece of the train and its engine, and could even lay tracks,
build bridges, and build makeshift train stations.
The first standardized locomotive for the
German army was the Zwilling, the twin.
It would run on the Heeresfeldbahn, a narrow
gauge, long range light railway designed for use near the front.
The Zwillings were used for years in training before eventually being sent to the German
African colonies and being sold to the Japanese, who used them during the Russo-Japanese War.
The next German standardized field locomotive was the Brigadelok.
It had a weight of 16,000 kilos and could stock 300 kilos of coal and reach a speed
of 25 km/hr.
Around 2,500 of these would be built during World War One for use on the Heeresfeldbahn.
I should point out that German soldiers were now not only trained with weapons, they were
trained to board and disembark the train cars of the regular state railway according to
specific schedules that were updated yearly.
Chief of Field Railways Major General Wilhelm Gröner was in charge of an enormous system
of tables dealing with railway planning, mobilization, and development, and when the war broke out...
he had just about nothing to do.
Everything went according to long-rehearsed plans and every soldier knew their departure
and arrival times.
Civilian transport was even integrated into the plans.
The railway battalions, 26,000 men strong, made certain that in the first three weeks
of August 1914, 3.1 million soldiers and 860,000 horses were transported on 11,100 trains to
the frontlines.
The French railway system for mobilization had around 6,000 trains and the British had
450.
But the war soon brought with it big railway
headaches.
As the German army advanced it took control
of many Belgian and French railways.
But most of the locomotives captured were outdated, tracks were without modern signals,
Belgian coal was unusable for the grids of German locomotives, single-track bridges couldn’t
be driven by German locomotives, the sidings were not long enough for the German trains.
The Belgians and French also destroyed tracks, bridges, and tunnels.
This didn’t really stop the Germans; they operated the signals by hand and reduced their
axle size, but still, here’s what a man of the railway battalions had to say:
“The engine driver did not know the route.
No one on the train knew where slopes were... in addition it was night.
For the most part, the route lacked any signals... the train driver had to get out and try to
decipher the station names with a lantern.
Far away on the horizon the men could see the flashes of the guns...”
There were many different widths of track, and a train built for, say, 600mm track couldn’t
travel on anything else, so your three choices were to use captured trains, remodel your
own, or change the tracks.
That’s it.
Now, Germany’s ally Austria-Hungary was
multi-multi national and had a crazy railway system that reflected this.
In different parts within the empire the railways
were different gauges so trains couldn’t go through and cargo would have to be unloaded
and re-loaded, and in some places the train lines would just end when they got to an internal
border and you’d have to go the long way around because Hungary or Bosnia or whoever
didn’t want certain trade to happen with certain people.
So here’s what Austria did when they mobilized: to avoid railroad problems all of the trains
were required to move at the speed of the slowest train on the slowest line for maximum
coordination.
That speed was ten miles per hour.
16 kilometers per hour.
That’s how fast bicycles go.
As Norman Stone wrote and as I pointed out at the beginning of the war, Austria-Hungary
went to war with the speed of a bicycle.
Anyhow, most German locomotives of the Heeresfeldbahn
were steam powered, but not all of them.
Some models ran on gasoline, and these were
really useful near the front, since the clouds from a steam engine revealed a train to enemy
artillery.
Armored trains were used near the front on the regular railway lines from nearly the
beginning of the war and were equipped with cannons in rotating gun turrets.
After the Battle of the Marne halted the German advance and trench warfare began, railways
behind the front were seriously elaborated.
The wounded, fresh soldiers, and the flood of post needed to be transported quickly.
And hundreds of thousands of German troops had to be suddenly transported over to the
Eastern Front.
On that front, after the successes at Tannenberg and Masurian Lakes, the German advance toward
Lodz was stalled by the railway gauge issue.
Re-gauging 1524mm trains to 1435mm was as inevitable as the Russian destruction of bridges,
tracks, and tunnels.
Actually, the more mobile war on the Eastern Front was a constant series of destroying
and rebuilding switches, water towers, roundhouses, cranes, semaphores, telegraph lines, and railway
hubs.
One of the major destructions was that of the 800m Miechow tunnel, which helped save
the Austrians from the Russian advance in the first winter of the war.
The Heeresfeldbahn, since it weighed a fifth what a normal military train did, turned out
to be great for getting men to the front, since it was light enough to cross terrain
like the muddy fields of Flanders, which larger trains couldn’t do.
All warring nations eventually used systems like this.
In mountainous regions like the Vosges or the Alps there were small cable railways or
inclined elevator trains to get the troops to their positions on high.
As far back as 1872 the Germans had made plans
for a railway link to the Persian Gulf.
From Berlin through the Ottoman Empire it
would be thousands of kilometers long and useful for transporting oil.
The war put an end to that dream but still saw a direct link between Berlin and Constantinople.
German advice and monetary support also helped build another famous project, the Hejaz Railway.
It was initially intended to bring pilgrims from Damascus to Mecca, though it only went
as far as Medina after the war interrupted construction.
It was an important means of transport and supply for the Ottomans, but was often attacked
or sabotaged by Lawrence of Arabia and the Arab Revolt.
So that’s a quick look at the trains of the First World War.
We looked at German trains because the Prussian railway system was the largest state owned
railway in the world and it was a true pioneer.
You can really see how German foresight in the decades before the war had produced a
system of transportation and mobilization second to none, which was absolutely crucial
to the German successes.
You can also see that once a country found itself fighting in conquered territory, railway
problems would be some of the biggest ones that often prevented any further expansion
and victory.