WWI ON RAILS

The outbreak of the Great War saw the rapid development of armoured trains - formidable weapons that played a pivotal role in the conflict

The war the British Army found itself fighting on the Western Front in 1914 bore little resemblance to the conflict it had won in South Africa just 15 years earlier.

Although mobile at first, it soon became bogged down in a quagmire of trenches and barbed wire. In such a static conflict, there was no significant role for armoured trains to play. However, by late 1914 the need for mobile heavy artillery that could strike deep behind enemy lines was apparent, and railway guns were soon being considered.

The idea of mounting artillery on trains had been tried before. In 1882, during the AngloEgyptian war, the British had mounted naval guns on rail trucks to serve as heavy artillery support and had done the same thing with coastal defence guns during the Second Boer War.

In Europe, meanwhile, the French became the first nation to purposely design and build a railway gun. By 1900, its army had 48 fiveand six-inch guns mounted on narrow gauge wagons called Peigné-Canet carriages in service as fortress artillery at Verdun, Toul, Epinal and Belfort.

By the outbreak of war, however, no army possessed a heavy weapon on wheels that could reach deep behind enemy lines. This meant the earliest examples of this new breed of gun had to be improvised. The French were first again when, in the autumn of 1914, they mounted an obsolete coastal defence gun onto existing commercial rolling stock.

The British, Germans and Americans followed suit and, by the time the war ended, railway guns were in operation all along the Western Front. They appeared on other fronts, too, with both the Italians and Russians developing them, with a total of 600 eventually involved in the conflict.