Engines of War

by Christian Wolmar

  In October, the first British ambulance train was sent to France and the fleet eventually built up to thirty, some of which were paid for by the British Red Cross Society. Further trains were provided in other theatres of the war, such as Egypt and Salonika. Early trains could carry only up to 300 stretcher cases, but later versions were able to accommodate a total of 1,000, most of them lying down, and the best were the well-furnished Princess Christian trains. J. A. B. Hamilton recalls that the ambulance trains were comfortable, having travelled on one from Lille to Boulogne, but he could not have been seriously injured as, true trainspotter that he was, he spent the night ‘in an agony of speculation as to what sort of locomotive might be hauling us’.30 He was able to find out in the morning by craning his neck out of his bunk when the huge train had stalled near Boulogne.

  After the initial failure to make any provision, the number and placement of ambulance trains exercised the military authorities in some detail before every battle and undoubtedly the efficiency of the service improved. Hamilton recalls that at times the handling of the wounded did show the required urgency: ‘On the opening day of the Messines Ridge battle on June 7, 1917… the mines [signalling the beginning of the assault] went off just before dawn, and at 2.15 on the same day the first wounded were arriving at Charing Cross’,31 presumably having made use of the boat train service that was by then in operation. They were luckier than the first arrivals from the battle of Antwerp in 1914, who, because of concern about spies, had been sent along the coast to Southampton as Dover was a military port.

  Overall, more than 2.6 million British troops were transported in ambulance trains throughout the conflict. Once across the Channel, the wounded were carried in a separate fleet of twenty-seven trains that had quickly been provided by the train companies at the behest of the War Office, which had devised detailed plans before the war while failing to actually commission any trains. The first were ready within a few weeks of the outbreak of the war to greet the wounded off the boats at Dover and Southampton, further adding to the considerable loads on the domestic railways.

  Indeed, the railways in Britain, which as mentioned previously were taken under the control of the Railway Executive Committee at the outbreak of war, were hugely overburdened throughout the conflict. After successfully transporting the British Expeditionary Force down to Southampton with commendable efficiency, the newly unified railways were faced with the awesome task of both catering for normal traffic and handling the massive military requirements. For the most part, the railways in Britain coped very well with the extra demands placed on them by the war. The load fell disproportionately on a few railways such as the London & South Western, which served Southampton and catered for no fewer than 20 million journeys by soldiers during the war, an average of 13,000 per day, and oddly, at the other end of the country, the Highland Railway, which served Cromarty Firth and Scapa Flow, two of the three main navy bases. All the supplies for the ships had to be carried on the railway, a single-track line that meanders through the Highlands, as well as, later in the war, the thousands of mines for the Northern Barrage, which stretched from the Orkneys to the coast of Norway and was designed to protect the British coastline from attack.

  At first the railways were very keen to maintain a ‘business as usual’ image to the public, which rather reflected the initial public mood since the war was on the other side of the Channel and those not directly affected continued as before. The railways boasted that they were providing ‘facilities as good as in June or in early July’ and traffic to the Continent carried on as near normally as conditions would allow. Amazingly, the Great Eastern Railway managed to maintain its Harwich -Hook of Holland service throughout the war. The London, Brighton & South Coast continued to issue tickets to all kinds of European destinations in Italy, Switzerland and Spain via Newhaven-Dieppe. There were clearly not that many takers as the Brighton line enjoyed a boom in first-class travellers who might normally have gone to the Côte d’Azur for their holidays but now had to make do with the south coast. After initially cutting back services in response to fears about overcrowding on the lines by military traffic, many were soon restored and the companies even resumed advertising and provided extra trains at Christmas as usual. There were just a few hints of the privations to come: the London & North Western cancelled the typewriting compartments it had installed on some of its London-Birmingham expresses and laid off the secretaries who provided the service. Wild rumours abounded. When a Liverpool – London express suffered a seventeen-hour delay at the end of August, a rumour swept through the country that the hold-up was due to the transport of Russian soldiers who had arrived in Scotland to help in the war effort. It was pure bunkum, but for several months thereafter anyone whose train was held up attributed the delay to the arrival of the Russians, which must have pleased the train companies, who would undoubtedly be delighted to have such an excuse today.

  Priority was given to military traffic and the ability of the rail companies to maintain existing levels of passenger service merely demonstrated that there was considerable spare capacity in the railway network thanks to the fact that the British railways system, unlike its counterparts on the Continent, had been built with no central direction from the state but rather through the haphazard process of competition by the private companies. Therefore, the system had far more duplication than elsewhere, which inadvertently ensured that the network could cope with the extra demands placed on it during the war. Indeed, obscure railways which before the war had been financial basket cases suddenly found themselves overburdened with trains. One such was the Stratford-on-Avon & Midland Junction, built primarily to carry ironstone but now becoming a useful route for mineral traffic between South Wales and the Midlands. Even the London Underground proved to be vital to the war effort as its City-widened lines, which connect King’s Cross with stations south of the Thames, proved invaluable for war traffic going through the capital.

  Gradually, though, the service deteriorated and cuts were made. The urgent demand at the end of 1916 for locomotives and rolling stock to be transferred abroad, together with a growing coal shortage, forced the British government to damp down the demand for civilian rail travel and consequently on 1 January 1917 sweeping cuts combined with fare rises of 50 per cent were introduced. Many dining cars were withdrawn, although sleeping cars were largely retained on the slightly dubious argument that government officials travelling on them needed a good night’s sleep. The public felt that these carriages were largely provided for the well-off. Many services were curtailed or cancelled, others slowed down to save coal and more than 400 stations and 200 miles of branch lines closed, their tracks ripped up for transfer to France. Yet the passengers still kept coming as soldiers on leave spent precious days at the seaside or well-paid munitions workers enjoyed their new-found wealth. It might not have been comfortable – as Westwood put it, ‘government spokesmen talked of “joy riders” and the need to eliminate them [but] by the end of the war there was little joy in riding the trains’ – but everyone still wanted to use the railways.32

  Not only had the creature comforts been taken away, and blinds put up to avoid trains being spotted from the air – which passengers tended to lift irrespective of the injunctions not to – but there was the danger from air raids first by Zeppelin airships and later by aircraft. Initially all trains had to stop during a raid, but the authorities realized this was counter-productive. There were just over a hundred raids on Britain in the whole war, and while damage to railway property was widespread, it was superficial and only twenty-four railway workers were killed by bombs. The most exciting confrontation was an incident involving an attack by an airship in Suffolk, described by a local newspaper reporter as ‘a mad neck-to-neck race between the airship and a Great Eastern train. As the train dashed along at top speed, the Zeppelin dropped five bombs at the rushing train below. All the missiles fell wide of the mark and the train steamed into Bury St Edmunds unscathed.’33 The pilot then appare
ntly waved, admitting defeat. Much of the damage to the railways was quickly repaired, demonstrating, as we shall see in the next two chapters, how difficult it is for aircraft to put a line out of commission for any length of time.

  It was the railways’ own incompetence which at times proved far more damaging to their efficiency than bombing raids. This was particularly true of the freight service, which was frequently overstretched because of that old problem of empty wagons not being returned promptly. Whole lines became clogged up as sidings filled with wagons – sometimes for up to two years34 – that were being kept ‘just in case’ or with excess supplies ordered by companies worried that they might run out of vital materials, only to find there was nowhere to unload them. Government departments were the worst culprits, commandeering whole wagons to transport a single small box and trains to travel ridiculously small distances – a few hundred yards in one case – when a horse and cart, let alone a lorry, would have done the job far quicker. There were tales of tarpaulins and ropes, vital to protect goods in open wagons, going missing in huge quantities.

  However, the worst aspect of the railways’ performance was the decline in safety. The stress that the railways were put under inevitably led to an increase in collisions and accidents, and it was not happenstance that the worst disasters in the history of both the British and French railways, Quintinshill and Saint-Michel-de-Maurienne, involved troop trains in the First World War, and there was a third similar accident, also involving a troop train in Romania, which was probably the worst ever in European history.

  The Romanian accident remains shrouded in mystery as not only did it occur during the war, when such incidents are routinely kept quiet, but it also happened in the remote eastern part of the country on what is now the border with Belarus and consequently precise details have never been ascertained. Nevertheless, from subsequent reports which have emerged there is little doubt that it was the deadliest accident in Europe and one of the worst in the history of the railways across the world. The Romanians had made the mistake of entering the war belatedly on the Allied side in August 1916 in the light of Russian successes in Galicia and had hoped to keep the Central Powers out of their territory but, overwhelmed by superior forces, had instead soon found themselves retreating from the Germans’ advance. Indeed, the speed of the German victory was the result of their intelligent exploitation of the available railway lines, as they moved troops swiftly by rail along the front to deliver a surprise attack on the foolhardy Romanians in what was later recognized as a logistical masterpiece.

  Consequently, huge numbers of Russian soldiers and Romanian civilians fled the German onslaught providing the backdrop to the disaster. On 13 January 1917, a massive train with twenty-six carriages crowded with wounded Russian soldiers as well as civilians escaping from newly invaded parts of the country left the small station of Barnova towards the next stop at Ciurea, which was down a steep incline of 1 in 40. Soon after the start of the descent, it became apparent that the brakes were not working properly, probably because, unbeknown to the train crew, the connecting pipes between the carriages had been broken by passengers stepping on them. Without any help from the brakes on the coaches, the braking power of the two locomotives was not sufficient to prevent the train hurtling ever faster down the slope. Despite the efforts of the train crew, who put the locomotives in reverse and tried to sand the track to get a better grip, the coaches were derailed as they entered the station at Ciurea and inevitably burst into flames, causing carnage. Remarkably, one of the survivors, Nicolae Dunanreanu, wrote an account of the disaster and described how, as the train was speeding down the hill, ‘everywhere people and particularly soldiers, clambered on to the roofs, steps and buffers gripping each other in mad desperation. There was not even the smallest corner free, one could not even get both feet on a step nor a buffer and these desperate people seeking a relative or fleeing from the enemy who occupied more than half the country could not guess that a greater disaster soon awaited them.’35 The ultimate death toll was thought to have exceeded 1,000, more than any other accident in the history of the railways in Europe, but no precise figure was ever issued by the authorities. Dunanreanu wrote only of seeing countless corpses on the day after the accident.

  The French accident at Saint-Michel-de-Maurienne was also caused by a runaway train and remains by far the deadliest in western Europe to this day. It was the callousness and incompetence of the military, rather than any error or misjudgement by railwaymen, that caused the tragedy. There was an uncanny similarity with events in Ciurea, as the accident resulted from an overcrowded train descending a steep incline without sufficient braking power. A long train of nineteen carriages was heading over the Alps on the night of 12 December 1917 with more than 900 French soldiers who had fought with the Italians and were now anxious to get home for two weeks’ leave over the Christmas period. Having come through the Mont Cenis tunnel, the train waited at Modane, preparing to descend into the valley below. It was held up for more than an hour to let through other trains, but before it set out there was a dispute over its progress. The train only had one locomotive, whereas normally there should have been two for such a heavy load, and to compound the problem only three of the carriages had air brakes while the rest had none or only hand-operated ones. The driver, Girard, told the stationmaster that he could not proceed without a second locomotive, but the only one available had been allocated to an ammunition train, and there was enormous pressure from the troops to get going. There was a demob-happy atmosphere in the station, made rowdier by the absence of the officers, who had departed on a faster train heading for Paris. Girard’s protest was referred to the local traffic officer, a Capitaine Fayolle, who ordered the driver to proceed, threatening that he would be thrown in the ‘forteresse’ if he refused. It was a classic case of the military trying to run the railway over the heads of the professionals and it was to have deadly consequences. Girard acquiesced reluctantly and the train departed for Saint-Michel-de-Maurienne, which is 1,000 feet lower, down an incline of 1 in 30, very steep for a railway. And far too steep for such a heavy train with just one locomotive’s brakes to control it. The train began to gather speed uncontrollably and the brakes started overheating, becoming ineffective and igniting fires. Aboard, there was panic, with the lights going out and some soldiers even jumping onto the tracks, judging this was the best chance of survival. At a bend approaching the station on a bridge with a 25 mph speed limit, the train was hurtling down at three times that speed and the inevitable happened as the carriages were thrown off the bridge and plunged into the gorge below, with several bursting into flames. Relieved of its heavy load, the locomotive stayed on the tracks.

  To be fair to Fayolle, it was not entirely his fault. The poilus, well tanked-up after hanging round for an hour in the bars at Modane while the other trains were being let through, were in no mood to wait and were unconcerned about such trivia as brakes and overcrowding. Every minute of their Christmas leave was precious and they were desperate to get back to their families and girlfriends. In the immediate aftermath of the disaster, 424 bodies were found, but the best estimate of the final death toll is 675, as many of the dead were incinerated in the ensuing fire, which took a day to burn out, and numerous survivors died from their wounds in distant hospitals.

  Apart from the high death tolls, the accidents in France and Romania have other similarities. In both cases, the subsequent fire resulted in the number of casualties remaining unknown and both were kept secret by the respective authorities until after the conflict because of the supposed propaganda advantage it would have given the enemy. A more credible explanation is that neither government wanted the incompetence that led to these disasters to be exposed.

  While the blame for Quintinshill, which was actually the earliest of these three accidents, can be firmly laid at the door of two signalmen whose sloppy practices were the immediate cause, it too was the result of the extraordinary strain on the rail network during the war. The sec
tion of the Caledonian Railway between Carlisle and Glasgow where the accident occurred was one of the busiest on the whole network, taking the majority of the huge amount of traffic between England and Scotland. The accident, near a small signal box at Quintinshill, in the vicinity of Gretna Junction, involved a triple collision on the morning of 22 May 1915. Because the two regular sleeper trains from London were late, as often happened, and the sidings on both sides were full with trains which had less priority than the expresses, a local train was directed to wait on the southbound track main line to let the overnights through. That in itself was not unusual but the signalmen then made a terrible mistake. They forgot that the local train was there, even though it was virtually in front of their window, and one of them had even just travelled to the signal box on it. Fatally, the signalman allowed through a troop train carrying 485 soldiers of the Royal Scots on their way from Scotland to Gallipoli in Turkey and it smashed into the local at 70 mph with such force that the carriages were telescoped into a third of their original length. The gas-lit carriages promptly burst into flames and, worse, one of the overnight sleepers smashed into the wreckage a minute later. The official death toll was 227 but this may be an underestimate as many bodies were burned beyond all recognition. The subsequent inquiry revealed not only an overworked signal box, but procedures that were lax in the extreme, with the two signalmen having a private arrangement about the timing of their changeover and sitting in the box chatting to the crew of the local when the fateful decision to allow through the troop train was made.