"…It was the American Civil War that would first see the train truly demonstrate its usefulness in military matters, first by providing the Confederates with key reinforcements at the Battle of First Bull Run, when Joseph E. Johnston¡¯s troops were transported from the Shenandoah by rail in time to help Beauregard fight the battle. When war broke out, there was some 30,000 miles of rail in the country, with about ¨ø of it concentrated in the North, and it would continue to prove its worth throughout the war, enabling massive movements of troops and supply for both sides – although more so the North. Their importance though made them targets, and both sides made to disrupt the others¡¯ logistical lifelines.
Probably the most famous attempt at this was ¡®The Great Locomotive Chase¡¯ which occurred in early 1862, when a group of Union raiders attempted to steal a train and ride it up to Chattanooga, which the Union Army was trying to capture. They would be destroying the W+A Railroad as they rode up it. hoping to cut the city off from effective resupply. It worked at first, and they got the train, but the Confederates were soon chasing them in their own locomotive, and the raiders were unable to do the damage to the line that they had hoped. They ran out of coal eventually, and had to abandon the train. Some were captured and executed, including their leader James J. Andrews.
The ¡®Chase¡¯ was not exactly the rule though. The Union being much more reliant on rail than the South, it was only logical that Northern lines would be targeted with much more frequency by Confederate partisans and guerillas than the other way around. Continued attacks on the PW+B Railroad as it traveled between Wilmington and Baltimore were a major problem for resupply down the East Coast, and since the entire line couldn¡¯t be guarded en masse, it was necessary to protect the trains on the expanses of track between outposts. The result was the creation of armored cars to be included in the train, examples of which can be seen here and here.
The Confederates got into the act as well, most notable with the so-called ¡°Dry Land Merrimac¡± deployed at Savage¡¯s Station in 1862. Named for its more than passing resemblance to the CSS Virginia, the iron-clad railcar carried a 32-pound cannon pointing from its front and was pushed along by an unprotected locomotive. It proved to be a very effective weapon, but the vulnerable engine meant that it was soon withdrawn from the fight, but not before inflicting an estimated 100 casualties. Later examples, known as ¡°cotton-bale¡± batteries, used wooden walls reinforced with cotton-bales on the outside for additional protection, used to attack Union forces at Galveston, Texas in early 1863. Functionally, these were more akin to railroad guns than what came to be defined as an armored train, and both sides experimented with rail-mounted artillery, the most notable being the heavy 13 in. mortars deployed outside Petersburg during the Union Siege. By the end of the war, strategic arrangements of rifle cars, an artillery car on each end, with the locomotive in the center were patrolling the Union rails and fending off banditry.
Although further development would stagnate in the USA – perhaps a little surprising given the westward expansion of the country into lands contested by the American Indians – I did find an interesting reference to the use of an armored train by law enforcement to deal with a miner¡¯s strike in 1913. The Sheriff of Kanawha County used an example built but the C&O Railroad following attacks on their train by the miners, and dubbed the ¡°Bull Moose Express¡± to do a ¡°drive by¡± shooting on the miners¡¯ camp, killing one of the miners and wounding others…"
From here
link
Wonder to know if any fellow member wargame with ACW trains…
Amicalement
Armand
ponders nirvana.
