The World the Railways Made

by Nicholas Faith

  In theory the inflexibility increased with the size of the armies being mobilised – in 1914 they amounted to forty German Army corps. According to Barbara Tuchman, in August, 1914, each one required ‘170 railway carriages for officers, 965 for infantry, 2960 for cavalry, 1915 for artillery and supply wagons, 6010 in all, grouped in 140 trains with an equal number for their supplies. From the moment the order was given, everything was to move at fixed times according to a schedule precise down to the number of train axles that would pass over a given bridge within a given time.’

  The classical account of the outbreak of war, best expounded by A. J. P. Taylor, is that ‘the decision for mobilisation which the German General Staff made and which Bethmann endorsed on 29th July was a decision for a general European war.’ The theory is based on the apparent facts: when the Kaiser repented of his decision to mobilise, he was told by his chief of staff, the nephew of the great von Moltke, that it was too late, that the machine was irreversible, had become an organisational Frankenstein.

  But Moltke was being unfair to the capacity of his own machine. His staff had prepared an alternative: for the French frontier to be held by a lightly-manned defensive wall, while the main weight of the army was hurled at the Russians. Such a deployment would at least have given the diplomats time to talk, a breathing space which, they claimed in retrospect, they were all eager to exploit. In the tragic event even the finest railway organisation in history could not cope with Moltke’s inflexibility (based on his sensitivity to the charge that he did not measure up to his uncle’s stature), combined with the Kaiser’s fickle emotionalism.

  August, 1914, was the last time that railways played a major part in strategic thinking. By 1939 motorised road transport had largely replaced the railway as the primary instrument. Railways became merely part of the logistical train: the ‘intendance’ had returned to the subordinate role to which Napoleon had consigned it. However, in World War II they remained crucial for transporting supplies and troops – it is now clear that had the Allies concentrated their bombing raids on the German railway system the war would have ended months earlier than it did. Moreover it was only the willingness of the Swiss to allow German supply trains through their Alpine tunnels which enabled German armies to continue to fight in Italy until April, 1945 and it was only the efficiency of the German railway system which enabled the Holocaust to proceed with its killing efficiency.

  A mere three years later the Berlin airlift proved that the railways were no longer indispensable. Stalin belonged to the railway age and assumed that Berlin would be starved into submission within a few weeks after its rail links had been cut. But the rules had changed, as the Berlin airlift showed so dramatically.

  The Great (Railway) Game

  Russian interest in Afghanistan dates back more than a century before their invasion in 1979. In the last thirty years of the nineteenth century their involvement, real or imaginary, became an obsession with the British in India. The rivalry, aptly nick-named ‘The Great Game’, was played in the romantic setting of the high Himalayas and railways became the major symbol of Russian expansionist intentions.

  The first proposal for a line along the old caravan route from Orenburg to Tashkent was made as early as 1874, only a few years after the Russians had completed their control of Turkestan. Their plans were delayed when a native revolt gave priority to the building of the Trans-Caspian railway to Kizyl Arvat, a line which soon seemed rather useless. It had not helped pacify the region and was nowhere near the agriculturally richer areas of Soviet Central Asia. Nevertheless in 1885 the Russians started to extend it eastward to Merv, an oasis they had captured the previous year.

  The seizure of Merv, and above all the new line, led to an outbreak of paranoid frenzy in British India. ‘No longer the prudent auxiliary to a single campaign,’ wrote Lord Curzon, the archetypal Imperialist, ‘it became the mark of a definite policy, imperial in its quality and dimensions. Till then the Russians had regarded the line as an isolated and limited undertaking, rather than part of a great design. It now emerged as a warning to England and a warning to Asia … the flame of diplomatic protest blazed fiercely forth in England but, after a momentary combustion, was as usual extinguished by a flood of excuses from the inexhaustible reservoir on the Neva’ – the river on which stood Saint Petersburg, then the Russian capital.

  The devilish Russkies paused a mere six weeks after reaching Merv before pressing on towards the Afghan frontier. The line included a hundred-mile stretch over the Kara Kum desert, whose shifting sands simply swept away the tracks, which, finally, had to be built entirely on an embankment. Only regular water trains could relieve the permanent shortage of water, and herds of camels derailed the odd train or two.

  To the British the line was no laughing matter. Immediately the Russians had completed their line to Merv the normally parsimonious, normally dilatory British Imperial government promptly built a railway to Chaman, within a few hundred yards of the Afghan frontier, complete with enough stores to complete the tracks a further forty miles inside Afghanistan to Kandahar. The project was so secret that it was code-named ‘the Henrai Road improvement scheme’. It was later renamed more prosaically the Sind-Peshia State Railway.

  Ten years later the Russians started to build from Samarkand to Tashkent, and by 1898 they had completed a through railway line stretching over a thousand miles. The line remained an empty symbol of Russian imperialism. In the event it was never used for a major military exercise. And when the Russians finally did invade Afghanistan, a hundred years after The Great Game had begun, they relied on road and air transport.

  The Carriage at Compiègne

  During the First World War Marshal Foch housed himself and his staff in three coaches formerly used to transport passengers on the Orient Express and other luxury trains. Towards the end of the war he ordered another, Number 2419, to be equipped as an office. In November, 1918, it was commandeered by Foch’s chief of Staff, General Weygand, and in the forest of Compiègne outside Paris it became the setting for the signature of the Armistice on 11th November, which ended the war.

  Number 2419 became the ultimate symbol to Germany of their country’s defeat, and Adolf Hitler ensured that France’s surrender in June, 1940, would be signed in the same carriage on the same spot which had witnessed Germany’s humiliation twenty-two years earlier. The symbolism still remained, however. The Germans stored carriage 2419, apparently safe from Allied bombing, in the little town of Ohrdruf, in Thuringia during the Second World War. But they were not going to allow it to be the setting of a second German humiliation. Just before the Americans arrived, a special detachment of SS troops blew it up.

  The General

  When Buster Keaton was asked why his famous film, The General, looked so much more authentic than Gone with the Wind, he replied, simply and truthfully, ‘Well, they went to a novel for their story. We went to history.’

  The Reverend William Pittenger, formerly of the 2nd Ohio Volunteers, called his own account of the episode The Locomotive Chase in Georgia.* He recounted how twenty-four Union soldiers under one James J. Andrews infiltrated the Confederate lines and very nearly managed to cut all the rail links between Chatanooga and the south and east.

  Only twenty of the twenty-four turned up at the rendezvous which, as Pittenger pointed out, emphasised the foolhardiness of the whole venture:

  The railroad was found to be crowded with trains, and many soldiers were among the passengers. Then the station – Big Shanty – at which the capture was to be effected had recently been made a Confederate camp … To succeed in our enterprise it would be necessary first to capture the engine in a guarded camp, with soldiers standing around as spectators, and then to run it from 100 to 200 miles through the enemy’s country, and to deceive or overpower all trains that should be met – a large contract for twenty men!

  They rode as passengers for a mere eight miles, then:

  When we stopped, the conductor, engineer, and many of the
passengers hurried to breakfast, leaving the train unguarded. Now was the moment of action! Ascertaining that there was nothing to prevent a rapid start, Andrews, our two engineers, Brown and Knight, and the fireman, hurried forward, uncoupling a section of the train consisting of three empty baggage or box cars, the locomotive and tender. The engineer and fireman sprang into the cab of the engine while Andrews, with hand on the rail and foot on the step, waited to see that the remainder of the band had gained entrance into the rear box car. This seemed difficult and slow, although it really consumed but a few seconds.

  While a sentinel a few feet away stood aghast, ‘Andrews, with a nod to his engineer, stepped on board. The valve was pulled wide open and for a moment the wheels of “The General” slipped around ineffectively; then, with a bound that jerked the soldiers in the box car from their feet, the little train darted away, leaving the camp and the station in the wildest uproar of confusion.’

  Andrews had a copy of the timetable for the single track line, according to which they would encounter only two trains. Unfortunately the operation had been delayed a day. On the original date ‘every train had been on time, the day dry, and the road in perfect order. Now the road was in disorder, every train far behind time, and two “extras” were approaching us.’

  At first all went well. They stopped for wood and water – Andrews coolly telling all and sundry that the train was a special carrying vitally needed supplies of gunpowder. At Etowah station they found an ancient engine, the ‘Yonah’, with steam up. They did not have time to disable it, so it was requisitioned by two pursuers, the train’s conductor, W. A. Fuller, and Anthony Murphy, foreman of the Atlanta workshops, who had started the pursuit in a handcar.

  The Union soldiers were averaging over a mile a minute in ‘The General’, giving the time to break a rail and thus stop the ‘Yonah’. Undeterred, Fuller and Murphy commandeered another train. They were too close to allow Andrews and his men time to break any more rails, or to destroy the first of the key bridges on the line:

  We broke out the end of our last box car and dropped cross-ties on the track as we ran, thus checking their progress and getting far enough ahead to take in wood and water at two separate stations. Several times we almost lifted a rail, but each time the coming of the Confederates, within rifle range, compelled us to desist and speed on. Our worst hindrance was the rain. The previous day had been clear, with a high wind, and on such a day fire would have been easily and tremendously effective. But today a bridge could be burned only with abundance of fuel and careful nursing.

  The Union men could not shake off Fuller and Murphy, who were merely jolted even when they ran over a rail skilfully dropped on the track on a blind bend. Fuller had managed to send a message to Chatanooga, which set off a panic among inhabitants unaware that the Union soldiers were desperately short of wood and water:

  The side and end boards of the last car were torn into shreds, all available fuel was piled upon it, and blazing brands were brought back from the engine. By the time we approached a long covered bridge the fire in the car was fairly started. We uncoupled it in the middle of the bridge, and with painful suspense awaited the issue.

  Alas, before the bridge had caught alight the pursuers were upon them, driving the burning car before them to the next side-track. At this Andrews’s nerve finally gave way and he ordered his men to jump and try and save themselves. Most were caught, and seven hanged as spies. The others escaped by attacking their guards, but six of the fourteen were recaptured – though they were repatriated in an exchange of prisoners less than a year later.

  Keaton took as his hero the Confederate engineer, Murphy, whom he renamed Johnnie Gray, and he gave Johnnie, not the Unionists, the ‘General’. Gray loved the engine almost as much as his beloved Annabelle Lee, who had spurned him because of his supposed cowardice, not realising that locomotive engineers were too important to be allowed to enlist.

  Keaton used contemporary wood-burning locomotives, and every possible railway gag, some not far from the real life chase. He used logs thrown at him by his pursuers as fuel; the trains race each other on parallel tracks and then rejoin the main line, with the pursuer emerging ahead of the train it was pursuing. After the pursuers had finally collapsed into a river Johnnie walks off into the sunset arm in arm with his beloved Annabelle.

  * In the Second World War – to the Russians the Great Patriotic War – their railways saved Mother Russia. Their existing network enabled them to move their whole armaments industry hundreds of miles east of Moscow, and two newly-built lines enabled them to supply Stalingrad and their forces in the Caucasus when the Germans had cut the direct lines from Moscow.

  * In the winter the troops could march over the ice on Lake Baikal, in the summer they could use ferry-boats, but in spring and autumn the lake was impassable.

  * Reproduced by D. A. Botkin in A Treasury of Railroad Folklore. When Walt Disney filmed the story, thirty years after Keaton, he called it The Great Locomotive Chase.

  XI

  THE GREAT RAILWAY RENAISSANCE

  Over the past thirty years railways throughout the world have made an extraordinary comeback. Yet in the three decades after 1945 it had been assumed that their decline – and eventual disappearance – was inevitable, a typical piece of misleading techno-forecasting. Even though they have retained their role in history as the true revolutionaries of mechanical transport, with the petrol engine and the jet aircraft merely representing evolutionary developments, the renaissance is surprising, for in an age obsessed with technical progress railways look increasingly old hat. Steel wheels still run on steel rails, which are still mostly 1435 mm apart and that most modern form of rail traction, the electric motor, first appeared well over a century ago. Yet ‘steel on steel’ retains its biggest single advantage, that it has a lower coefficient of friction than any other form of contact and therefore requires less effort, less energy than, say a rubber tyre on a road.

  Today the words of Louis Armand, greatest of 20th century railwaymen, ring truer than ever. When asked why he wanted to electrify France’s main railway lines at a time in the 1960s when it was assumed that cars buses and lorries would take over the role played by railways he replied simply ‘when everyone has a car they will return to the railways’. Indeed, as soon as car ownership became the norm people could make a rational judgment as to the worth of the railways. Their advantages have increased as travel by car has become less and less attractive, hampered by a lack of road capacity, higher petrol prices, an increased concern for the environment – as well as cleaner, faster trains. Moreover the younger generation seems less keen on driving than its car-obsessed parents. So throughout the world – apart from the United States – railways are again recognised as an essential element in any society whose members are aspiring to a civilised life, resulting in ever-more ambitious plans for countries’ railway systems.

  In fact, despite the seemingly unstoppable rise of motorised transport, only a minority of the tracks were lost, and those were mostly little-used rural routes. In Britain, a sentimental country, the attempts by Dr Richard Beeching as chairman of British Rail to make a logical distinction between commercially viable routes and those which could be justified only on social grounds made him a hate figure for those who love railways for their own sake not for their utility. Fortunately few architecturally important stations, apart from Penn Station in New York and Euston in London (together with its heavy, ugly but much-lamented Doric Arch), succumbed to the wreckers’ ball though many suffered from neglect.

  The only major exception to the retreat suffered by the railways in the thirty or forty years after 1945 was in China. When Mao Tse Tung came to power in 1949 the country’s railway system was a mere 14,000 km – excluding Mongolia where the Japanese occupiers had built several thousand more miles. Most of the lines had been built before 1911 by the Europeans who had dominated the country, and as a result railways had been indissolubly associated with their imperial attitudes. Mao institu
ted a massive programme which resulted in an eight-fold expansion within forty years, starting with two what might be called ‘imperial’ lines from the coast to areas in the west threatened with revolts against Beijing’s supremacy. These were followed by an enormously impressive line into the mountainous south west of the country and, more recently, a stupendous line up to the Tibetan plateau, 11,000 feet high.

  The massive expansion has been accompanied by an equally staggering increase in the speed of the trains. Because the Chinese had plenty of coal and virtually no oil they continued building steam locomotives until the 1980s and the last steam train service survived into the 21st century. But as electrification spread speeds rose from a maximum of 120kph to 200kph and that was before they embarked on the most ambitious programme of high-speed lines in the world. As so often the Chinese called in foreign businesses, learnt from them, and thus became steadily more independent. Although the programme was temporarily halted in 2011 because a major accident revealed the depth of corruption and incompetence in the Ministry of Railways they can now boast some 10,000km of high speed lines, more than the rest of the world put together, including the longest single route, 2,300km long, from Beijing to Gungzhou.

  For the biggest single contribution to the return of rail as a viable competitor not only to the motorcar but also to air travel has been increasing speed, not only on existing routes but also on the many new high-speed lines the world over from France to South Korea. Not only are the speeds up to 200mph, nearly double that available on historic lines. The pioneers, the Shinkansen in Japan and the Trains Grande Vitesse – the French and now international name for these trains – were those rarest of phenomena, a major step forward which employed proven technology and were pioneering efforts which made a profit from day one. The first Shinkansen between Tokyo and Osaka was designed to demonstrate the extent to which Japan had recovered from the war in time for the opening of the Tokyo Olympics in 1964. Unfortunately the line’s pioneering engineer had underestimated the cost of a route that involved 3,000 bridges and 67 tunnels. As a result of the overspend he was frozen out, not even invited to the opening. The TGV, which went into service in the early 1980s was a result not only of French attempts to keep up with the Japanese but also of the vast increase in petrol prices resulting from the first oil crisis of 1973.