Question about networks and charter trains after major wars

[BazingaTribe]

This is mostly in wanting broader historical references and information in order to develop a storyline involving displaced persons after a major conflict and services being restored after a war. It's not connected to a real place or time, but I have written secondary world (i.e. like Narnia or Middle Earth) fiction where the world is a mishmash of late Victorian/early 20th century central Europe after a cataclysmic war. Railways developed much like they did in the real world, with regular services, but I suspect in the immediate aftermath of hostilities they would be finding it difficult to run those regular services at regular times.

So...how might the railways be used to transport people who have had to evacuate their own towns and villages back to those places? You see romantic views of the agit-trains of earlier Soviet Russia like in this poster here: https://www.reddit.com/r/PropagandaPosters/comments/n95ijj/agitprop_trains/ and I'm guessing these were steered around the network by some chap in a signal box who knew when and where they'd be coming so they didn't crash into other trains. In a situation where most of the railways would essentially be charter services, are there any good sources that explain how this worked in practice or memoirs from people who worked in this situation? The linked poster is close to what I imagine as a time period but the story centres more about ordinary people trying to get home.

Likewise I'm thinking in the chaotic post-WW2 European world they weren't just running the normal 9.20 from Berlin to Hamburg. (Shout out to one of my favourite films, Miloš Forman's Closely Observed Trains, set in wartime Czechoslovakia, where the protagonist was an apprentice dispatcher, although while still under German occupation -- they obviously knew in advance what was coming through.) So... presumably they had to be on the ball 24/7 to receive communication about services entering their area?

Sorry if this is not very articulate. I have a mental image of the kind of thing I want to write/draw about -- I'm a very visual person -- but not very technical and so not sure how the infrastructure would actually work in times of uncertainty.

 

[etr221]

A couple of things:
1) The basis of railway operation (pretty much worldwide) in that period was that trains were sent from station to station, stations being on contact (by telegraph or (later) telephone) with each other, and with some sort of control, which would issue timetables, special notices and direct instructions as required and appropriate - while all railways did thing differently, that was the general principle. When things were normal, and everything running smoothly, stations would just signal trains forward... when not it would be a case of improvisation,
2) When cataclysm struck, railways had a can do, service should be provided if at all possible, attitude - and while the normal timetable would go out of the window very rapidly, every effort would be made to provide some sort of service as long as possible, to meet whatever need there was, although it may well have been a case of trains heading in a general direction and stopping at all stations until they could proceed further. And if people decided to flee they would head to the station and just pile on to any train heading in the right direction - which might well be strengthened with any vehicles available that were at all suitable for carrying people.
3) Once the cataclysm passed, every effort would be made to restore lines (railway and telegraph) as soon as possible, with some sort of control (either through 'normal' railway channels, or military ones if they had taken control), and then train services of some sort, although it would take a while for anything resembling a timetable (let alone a normal one) to be restored. Depending on how the refugees were being managed, by whatever authorities there might be, then either they would just go to stations and hope for trains 'home', or - eventually - some programme of special trains might be organised.

If you want more, the people to contact are probably the Military Railway Study Group - whose purpose is

to collect, exchange and whenever possible, to publish factual information on the operation of the railways of any combatant nations . Relevant material from any era, when the military used railways in war and peace, and other associated subjects, from supporting or neutral countries, is also of considered interest.
The wartime railway had not been extensively studied by serious railway historians until fairly recently. The Study Group was founded in 1989 as The World War 2 Railway Study Group to address this.

I would imagine there is a reasonable amount written about how the railways of countries such as the Netherlands, Germany and others managed in 1945, or in 1918-19, when they did have to face the situation you describe, but how much is in English I've no idea (although I think some British and American military railwayman have written memoirs of the time, and getting newly occupied/liberated railways working). And I would suggest the MRSG is probably your best initial way of finding out what there is.

 

[BazingaTribe]

Wow. Thanks very much. I appreciate the response and will look the MRSG up.

 

[Gloster]

Over the years the Bulletin of the MRSG, until recently the World War II Railway Study Group, has included quite a few short memoirs of people who served in the ear, some of whom were in Germany at the end of the war in or in its aftermath. It has also translations by one of the members from a wide variety of German publications. However, it is a small and dispersed group, so there is a limit to how much help it can give.

Refugees were a low priority and military traffic was always going to come first. There was always a tendency by a military area to move the problem somewhere else, for convenience or to avoid such things as food riots or epidemics, but kindness would probably be in short supply. It would be chaotic, with long waits in fields and then rushing trains or being herded onto anything that moved. Some people would just remain docilely waiting to be told what to do (‘the emptiness of defeat’), others would try to push to the front (and sometimes get shot for their pains) and yet others would try whatever devious method they could.

Even in the aftermath of an advance, the military railways had trained and prepared to get some sort of operation going: there were special types of very simple signalling that could be used, a military hierarchy organised to control the system, staff were trained in variety of different ways so that they could meet all sorts of eventualities (no, “Not my job, mate”). The priority would be to support the advancing forces further ahead, then to consolidate the military situation and then to settle in: civilians were a low priority. Gradually, probably over years, a more normal service would develop. One example: many passenger trains in Germany continued to use open wagons for several years after World War II due to the massive loss of rolling-stock and the allied military having first call on what was left.

 

[BazingaTribe]

That actually gives a lot of potential for good storytelling, Gloster. Thank you very much .

 

[Gloster]

You have to think how the situation would develop as the front moved forward. The following is most influenced by the advance through Germany in 1945.

As the losers retreated, they would destroy or booby-trap infrastructure in order to deny its use to the advancing forces, block roads, provide cover for themselves and deny it to the others. Once the advancing forces reached somewhere their main aim would be to advance with the minimum losses of men and material. Unless they had been instructed to avoid damaging something, nothing was immune: it might be convenient to leave a railway bridge undamaged, but if the enemy might use it as a defensive position it is, ‘All guns - Fire.’ Once the front has advanced a bit the main priority is to get supply and reinforcement routes clear: a damaged railway bridge might be repairable, but if it blocking a road it will be blown up and the remains bulldozed. They are not going to wait for a crane to lift it out.

Only when the front has advanced far enough will they start looking at more general communication routes, but even then virtually no effort will be expended on anything that doesn’t have military value. The first railway troops might appear at this point in order to assess what needs to be done. Gradually as the front moves forward the railway will start rebuilding and operating to depots some way behind the front line, but military requirements are the whole basis of the planning. Only when the front is a long way on and secure, or the war is over, do you start considering civilian needs and stability when planning work. Often this work will be done by the native civilian organisation, but under the overall control of the military or civil-military powers.

And what of the civilians? During the battles they will just stay in their homes or shelters, not just for safety, but also to avoid being grabbed by one side or other. Once the front has passed they, if they have any sense, will still keep inside due to the possibility of being shot due to the fear of stay-behinds and saboteurs: there may be a curfew. They may stay in their house or they might be give an hour or two to get out as the military have requisitioned it. They might be told to take in refugees or, if booted out, told to go another house that has been told to accept refugees, or they might just be left to fend for themselves. Once the system calms a bit and the military or military-civil authorities feel that they can start to allow civilians to move about, they will be able to do so, but still under control, which will only ease gradually. Those who have been swept away from their distant home towns will try to get back to them, while those who have lost everything may try to start anew elsewhere or dump themselves on relatives.

However, train services for civilians will long remain unreliable, basic and difficult. The military’s only real concern about civilians is that they don’t become so desperate that they start becoming a nuisance.

The situation is slightly different when the advance is through other allied countries, as with France and the Low Countries in 1944. Here there will be a more sympathetic attitude and you may well have a government in exile that will have made preparations to deal with the situation once the front has moved. But military considerations still come first.

 

[D6130]

The late P.M. Kalla-Bishop was an officer in the Railway Operating Division 0f the Royal Engineers during World War Two and played a large part in the reconstruction and operation of the Italian railway system in 1944-47. His book "Locomotives at War" gives a fascinating insight into how things worked - or sometimes didn't - and the necessary compromises between military and civilian priorities. Copies are available from Amazon and other sources.

 

[BazingaTribe]

Thank you, both.

It feels more...real now. I have definitely understood the militarisation of the railways and it sounds like other people just had to make do.

Kalla-Bishop sounds like what my own grandad did in Italy after Monte Cassino. He did property work -- re-establishing ownership -- after not being fit to fight and it being suggested he therefore finished his law degree. He was in the actual Forces, and moved on to Burma to do much the same thing, but he never saw action. Alas, he died when I was twenty, so I never really knew him enough as an adult to get him to talk -- although I do know, sadly, he was appalled enough at what he saw in Burma to join the Northern Irish peace movement and never bought Japanese electronics (ironically, the bulk of what they had was German...). I did a Master's in Law Research and it would have made a very interesting dissertation subject , but he buried himself in his legal writing when he returned home and left no memoirs.

 

[flowcoach]

It’s worth googling Schwellenpflug to see the amount of effort a well-organised retreating army will put into denying a railway line to the enemy.

“The German railroad ploughs were produced by the Krupp factory in 1942. The platform on which was mounted a giant hook that spearheaded went under the sleepers, hauled by two locomotives to work for him at the speed of 7-10 km/h.

The hook was lowered into the middle of the track resulting in pulling the rails out of alignment, tearing up the middle of the track, and breaking the sleepers.

This destroyer was required to bring into position only 6-8 minutes, served by a team of 10 people. Railway tracks were completely destroyed, sleepers by 100%, the rails at 70-93%, and bonding of up to 30%.”

 

[Pigeon]

Invented, I believe, and certainly used, in the American Treasonous Slaveholders' Rebellion, which was basically the first major intersection of railways and warfare, and saw the development of many techniques both for rapidly destroying railways and for cobbling them back together little less rapidly.

 

[Taunton]

A close relative, fortunately still with us to tell the tale including to me, was right there as a child at the retreat of the Soviets on the German eastern front in June 1941. They were on what we like to think was the last Soviet train out from Brest, eastwards, with mainly resident Soviet military families. Quite how mother with children managed to get on the completely full train where the way was fully barred by defending soldiers is a story in its own right. In typical Soviet bureaucratic fashion, valid tickets, no longer on sale, were still being demanded. There was no concept of a timetable, it had just somehow been organised, and it was leaving.

We don't believe any of those left at the crowded station when it departed, soldiers or families, managed to survive.

Separately, Russian railways are 5'0" gauge. This goes right back to the first one. Czar Nikolai 1 took a personal interest in the first railways, and organised for engineers to go and study pioneer lines in Britain. They reported back that 4'8" was becoming the European standard gauge, which eventually would allow trains to run right through from Paris to Moscow.

This was the last thing Nikolai 1 wanted. Born 1796, he had been a junior officer trainee at Napoleon's invasion of Moscow in 1812. Not going to have that again, there will be a change of gauge at the Russian border so they cannot come straight through. A supportive mechanical engineer told him that if the gauge was just changed by 4 inches, and made wider, that would make it pretty impossible to do any field adaptations with substitute axles and wheels for rolling stock to run through.

Fast forward 100 years, and in 1941 this premonition absolutely came to pass, and is one of the items credited with thwarting the German advance, especially when in winter snows and spring mud the railway was about the only practical heavyweight transport.

 

[BazingaTribe]

That's pure gold, Taunton -- and pretty insightful of Nikolai I.

Pass my regards on to your relative.

 

[The exile]

You have to think how the situation would develop as the front moved forward. The following is most influenced by the advance through Germany in 1945.

As the losers retreated, they would destroy or booby-trap infrastructure in order to deny its use to the advancing forces, block roads, provide cover for themselves and deny it to the others. Once the advancing forces reached somewhere their main aim would be to advance with the minimum losses of men and material. Unless they had been instructed to avoid damaging something, nothing was immune: it might be convenient to leave a railway bridge undamaged, but if the enemy might use it as a defensive position it is, ‘All guns - Fire.’ Once the front has advanced a bit the main priority is to get supply and reinforcement routes clear: a damaged railway bridge might be repairable, but if it blocking a road it will be blown up and the remains bulldozed. They are not going to wait for a crane to lift it out.

Only when the front has advanced far enough will they start looking at more general communication routes, but even then virtually no effort will be expended on anything that doesn’t have military value. The first railway troops might appear at this point in order to assess what needs to be done. Gradually as the front moves forward the railway will start rebuilding and operating to depots some way behind the front line, but military requirements are the whole basis of the planning. Only when the front is a long way on and secure, or the war is over, do you start considering civilian needs and stability when planning work. Often this work will be done by the native civilian organisation, but under the overall control of the military or civil-military powers.

And what of the civilians? During the battles they will just stay in their homes or shelters, not just for safety, but also to avoid being grabbed by one side or other. Once the front has passed they, if they have any sense, will still keep inside due to the possibility of being shot due to the fear of stay-behinds and saboteurs: there may be a curfew. They may stay in their house or they might be give an hour or two to get out as the military have requisitioned it. They might be told to take in refugees or, if booted out, told to go another house that has been told to accept refugees, or they might just be left to fend for themselves. Once the system calms a bit and the military or military-civil authorities feel that they can start to allow civilians to move about, they will be able to do so, but still under control, which will only ease gradually. Those who have been swept away from their distant home towns will try to get back to them, while those who have lost everything may try to start anew elsewhere or dump themselves on relatives.

However, train services for civilians will long remain unreliable, basic and difficult. The military’s only real concern about civilians is that they don’t become so desperate that they start becoming a nuisance.

The situation is slightly different when the advance is through other allied countries, as with France and the Low Countries in 1944. Here there will be a more sympathetic attitude and you may well have a government in exile that will have made preparations to deal with the situation once the front has moved. But military considerations still come first.

The classic example of this is the (no doubt highly embellished) “Bridge at Remagen”.

 

[eldomtom2]

Separately, Russian railways are 5'0" gauge. This goes right back to the first one. Czar Nikolai 1 took a personal interest in the first railways, and organised for engineers to go and study pioneer lines in Britain. They reported back that 4'8" was becoming the European standard gauge, which eventually would allow trains to run right through from Paris to Moscow.

This was the last thing Nikolai 1 wanted. Born 1796, he had been a junior officer trainee at Napoleon's invasion of Moscow in 1812. Not going to have that again, there will be a change of gauge at the Russian border so they cannot come straight through. A supportive mechanical engineer told him that if the gauge was just changed by 4 inches, and made wider, that would make it pretty impossible to do any field adaptations with substitute axles and wheels for rolling stock to run through.

This is a common myth. To quote R. M. Haywood's 1969 paper on the topic:

Why did Major Whistler choose the 5-foot gauge rather than the 4 foot 8 1/2 inch one to which almost all Continental European and the majority of American railways were being built? According to a widely accepted popular belief, the gauge of Russian railways was deliberately chosen to prevent their use by an invading army using equipment built to the gauge of 4 feet 8 1/2 inches. This view is erroneous. As has been seen, the gauge of the Warsaw-Vienna Railway had been chosen to facilitate rather than to hinder connection with the Austrian railway system. In 1841 a Russian army engineer had written in the official journal of the Main Administration of Transport and Buildings that if Russia were invaded, any railway the invaders might use could be easily destroyed by the retreating defenders, thereby rendering it useless to the invading army.

In actuality, Major Whistler-who also perhaps wished to make some slight concession to the advocates of the broader 6-foot gauge-had stated in his report to Count Kleinmichel that he wished to add the extra 3 1/2 inches because this extra width would make locomotives easier to build and repair, while it would not materially add to costs. He felt that he could do this because the St. Petersburg-Moscow Railway would not connect with other railways of a different gauge.

Whistler's decision was made only for the St. Petersburg-Moscow Railway and without reference to any other railways, either Russian or foreign. But after the Crimean War, during the reign of Tsar Alexander II, the Russian government began to build a network of railways and of course wished to facilitate their connection with the St. Petersburg-Moscow Railway rather than with foreign railways. The gauge of the St. Petersburg-Moscow Railway therefore proved decisive in determining a uniform gauge for all Russian railways. In January 1857 the privately financed Main Company of Russian Railways was set up. It was to complete the St. Petersburg-Warsaw Railway (begun in 1851) with a branch from Wilno via Kovno to the Prussian border and was to build three new trunk lines: (1) Moscow-Nizhnii Novgorod, (2) Moscow-Orel-Kharkov-Theodosia, and (3) Orel-Libau. The Russian government stipulated that all railways built by the Main Company were to be built to the 5-foot gauge and were to be connected in the capitals to the St. Petersburg-Moscow Railway. Finally on March 18, 1860, the Russian government, in issuing regulations on the dimensions and measurements of rolling stock and roadbeds for all future railways, decreed that all major railways in Russia were to be built to the gauge of 5 feet, which henceforth was to be standard.

 

[Gloster]

I have just reread the initial post. In the late nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century the treatment of civilians would have been even worse. They might be just be ignored, forced to move or rough it, or be impressed as temporary slave labour: the military placed no value on them and saw itself as having no responsibility, moral or otherwise, to them. The military operations would be influenced by the way that transport was still based around horses and the like: a mule can go where a cart cannot and there were many weapons designed for transport by mules. But rural civilians were possibly better used to roughing it than later on and so could take to the forests, while urban ones were often far less prepared. Also, there was the way that people had moved from place to place far less: a far higher proportion of people had never, or hardly ever, travelled. Somewhere only ten kilometres away was a totally alien environment, which was a further encouragement to remain unless forced to move, which the military had no scruples about demanding if it suited them. Civilians were often seen as nothing but slave labour.

 

[Taunton]

This is a common myth. To quote R. M. Haywood's 1969 paper on the topic:

I am afraid one has to accept that it appears in mainstream Russian history books, by those who have researched Czar era documentation.

The story of the straight alignment of the Moscow to St Petersburg railway, the Czar running his pencil along his sword on the map to show the engineers the route, and the double bends at Redkino being where the Czar had his fingers on the sword, is however described there as a longstanding joke!

 

[BazingaTribe]

The story of the straight alignment of the Moscow to St Petersburg railway, the Czar running his pencil along his sword on the map to show the engineers the route, and the double bends at Redkino being where the Czar had his fingers on the sword, is however described there as a longstanding joke!

As an aside, that story lives on in Basingstoke's multitude of roundabouts being the result of town planners putting their mugs of tea down on the maps and causing circular stains to be mistaken for part of the proposed road network.

Nice to see nothing ever changes in terms of memetic mutation.

 

[eldomtom2]

I am afraid one has to accept that it appears in mainstream Russian history books, by those who have researched Czar era documentation.

Can you provide the names of those history books? I've done further searching and have not found any reliable sources claiming that the Russian gauge was selected due to military considerations, and many that say the opposite:

• Douglas J. Puffert in Tracks Across Continents, Paths Through History mentions the claim to dismiss it as a myth, and further states that the first appearance of the claim is an 1866 report by The Times; since the report incorrectly stated that Russia used a narrower gauge than standard gauge, its accuracy is very questionable
• In 1939 George Whistler's 1842 report recommending a gauge of 5ft for the Moscow-St Petersburg railway was reprinted in The Railway and Locomotive Historical Society Bulletin; the report does not mention anything about military considerations
  
• R. M. Haywood (who's 1969 paper on the topic has already been quoted) wrote a lengthy and detailed book on the construction and early days of the Moscow-St Petersburg railway, Russia enters the railway age 1842-1855, released in 1998. Nothing is mentioned about the idea that the gauge was selected for military reasons
  
• Alexandre Tarsaidze's 1950 paper American Pioneers in Russian Railroad Building discusses George Whistler's involvement in the selection of 5ft gauge and does not mention military reasons
  
• And a Google search for "выборе ширины колеи" brings up a lot of Russian-language websites that either don't mention the idea that Russian gauge was selected for military reasons or dismiss it as a myth.

 

[Taunton]

As an aside, that story lives on in Basingstoke's multitude of roundabouts being the result of town planners putting their mugs of tea down on the maps and causing circular stains to be mistaken for part of the proposed road network.

Ah, exactly the same story about the Moscow Metro (and it probably predates Basingstoke's roundabouts). Engineers showed their proposed initial radial network, with a certain amount of trepidation, to Stalin in the 1930s. Stalin looks closely at the map and all the crossing lines, red, blue, yellow. Then says how useful this ring line is. What ring line? This brown one. Nobody could bring themselves to tell Stalin that's where he had put his coffee cup, so they had better build it. Unlike London's Circle Line it's a pretty well geometric circle, in reality and on the map. Coloured brown. Here:

Moscow Metropolitan -- Metro map

 

[BazingaTribe]

Oh yes. We went on it back in the Yeltsin days. My dad and I tried to cross Moscow to get to the hotel my mum was doing business at and it was a scary process when you couldn't even sound out the letters, so we tried to go across the city at surface level. It was rather humbling but got me hooked on the place. I've since learned Russian (after living in Poland for a bit and learning that language, I then showed my friends the delights of the Baltic States) but the unfortunate result is that I know exactly what the lying, Putinite propaganda captions on Russian TV say and I wish I didn't because it's just so sad to see history repeating itself all over again. What can I say but at least this time the trainfuls of refugees from eastern Ukraine met with a much better reception at their destination.

I also have to laugh a bit in an ironic sense about the thread elsewhere about leaves on the line. Stalin ordered birch forests to be planted along the railways as a form of screen to stop people seeing sensitive installations along the way. Russian transport safety has never been great but you can't help but admit it's hauntingly beautiful.

Nothing really to add but nyet voinie -- no to war.