BOTH GOVERNMENTS AND MILITARY commanders soon appreciated the potential of the railroads for warfare. Shortly after its opening in 1830, the Liverpool and Manchester Railway (see Liverpool and Manchester line) was used to carry a regiment of troops from Manchester to the docks in Liverpool en route to quell a rebellion in Ireland. The 31-mile (50-km) journey took just over two hours, rather than the two days it would have taken by foot, and the troops arrived in a much fresher state. Around this time, revolutionary fervor was brewing in Europe, and by the late 1840s, rulers across the continent were using the railroads to help crush these revolts. The first major movement of troops by rail took place in 1846, when a contingent of 14,500 Prussian soldiers was sent to put down the Krakow rebellion of Polish nationalists against their Austrian rulers. The Prussians rapidly suppressed the uprising, with considerable bloodshed, after covering the 200-mile (340-km) journey in just two days. Then, two years later, Tsar Nicholas I of Russia, the most reactionary of the mid-19th-century monarchs, sent 30,000 troops on the newly built Warsaw–Vienna railroad to help his ally, Emperor Ferdinand I of Austria, to put down another nationalist rebellion—this time in Hungary. Again, the result was a defeat for the revolutionaries, with much loss of life.
After this, the scale of troop movements around Europe increased. In the winter of 1850, Austria used the railroads to send a 75,000-strong army, along with 8,000 horses and untold equipment, from Vienna to Bohemia. Due to poor weather and the fact that trains traveled along a single line, the move took longer than expected—26 days for a mere 150-mile (240-km) journey—demonstrating that an enormous amount of planning was still needed to use the railroads effectively. Three years later, the French organized a massive movement of troops during the Crimean War, in what is now Ukraine. Most of the army of 400,000 men despatched to fight in the Crimea traveled to the Mediterranean seaports on the railroad being built between Paris and Marseilles. Although the line was not finished, troops were able to use long sections of it, greatly improving their journey. In fact, it was during the Crimean War that the first railroad line intended specifically for military purposes was built. This was the work of the British, who fought alongside the French, and who had struggled to bring men and supplies up to Sevastopol, which they were besieging, from the port of Balaklava 8 miles (13km) away. The hilly road was little more than a dirt track, and a bottleneck soon built up in the port. To relieve it, a group of “navvies” (see The Father of Railroads) was sent from Britain to build a line between the port and the camp outside Sevastopol. They were a wild bunch, causing mayhem on their journey by getting drunk and trying to catch apes in Gibraltar, but they were very effective builders. The Grand Crimean Central Railway—an overblown name for a short, narrow-gauge railroad powered partly by horses and partly by steam engines—was built remarkably fast (just seven weeks) in 1855. It proved to be of enormous value, enabling troops and provisions, including heavy guns, to be hauled up the hill to support the assault on Sevastopol. The railroad made it possible to bring an unprecedented number of guns to bear on the town, which eventually succumbed under the barrage, effectively ending the war.
It was during the American Civil War, however, that railroads came of age as strategic assets. The conflict had been brewing for a long time, and had its roots in the differences between the northern and southern states. The North was industrializing and developing its economy on the basis of manufacturing, but the South remained primarily agricultural (cotton was its principal export) and depended on slave labor. The trigger for the war was the inauguration of Abraham Lincoln as president in 1861. Lincoln opposed the expansion of slavery to new states; the southern states, fearing the complete abolition of slavery, seceded from the Union in the spring of 1861, thus starting the war.
The Civil War was a bloody affair, claiming the lives of 620,000 soldiers. The battles between the Southern Confederates and the Northern Federal Army were fought on an unprecedented scale. Throughout history, even wars that raged over long periods typically featured only a handful of battles. However, during the four years of the War Between the States, a remarkable 10,000 military encounters took place, of which nearly 400 were significant enough to be considered full-scale battles—which means a battle was fought every four days. Moreover, the war was fought over an area even bigger than Europe, a vast territory that was only made accessible by the railroads.
By the outbreak of the war, US railroads extended over more than 30,000 miles (48,000km). The lines covered most of the eastern states and much of the Midwest, so both troops and matériel could be carried rapidly around the country. Both sides understood the importance of the railroads, but the North made better use of them. Even before the war started, Lincoln ensured that the key railroads were taken under government control and that military traffic was given priority. The outcome of the first major land battle of the war—at Bull Run, Virginia, a small river just 20 miles (32km) south of Washington, DC—was determined by the clever use of the railroads by the Confederates. The battle started as an attempt by the Federal Army to bring the war to a rapid close by capturing Richmond, the Confederate capital. The Federal Army attacked the enemy alongside Bull Run, and initially gained the upper hand. However, they found themselves defeated by a counter-attack, made possible by the quick arrival of Confederate reinforcements via rail from the Shenandoah Valley in the west. This was an important lesson for both sides, and from then on most of the war’s major battles took place at or near railroad junctions or stations.
The Federal Army launched the Peninsular Campaign—another effort to capture Richmond—in March the following year, and brought “the war’s wizard of railroading” into action. This was Herman Haupt, a brilliant engineer whose background made him the ideal man to harness the railroads for wartime use: he had graduated from West Point, the US Army training college, but then became a professor of mathematics and engineering, and had been appointed superintendent of the Pennsylvania Railroad, one of America’s most important lines.
Haupt established two main principles regarding the use of railroads in war. Firstly, the military should not interfere with the operation of services, since it was vital to keep to reliable railroad schedules. Secondly, it was crucial to ensure that empty freight cars were returned to their place of origin and not used as warehouses (or even offices by senior personnel), because running out of freight cars in wartime could mean the difference between success or failure in battle.
Haupt’s first task in the Peninsular Campaign was to repair the Richmond, Fredericksburg, and Potomac Railroad, a 15-mile (24-km) vital artery that connected the two capitals, Richmond, Virginia, and Washington, DC. The Confederates had wrecked the line in order to damage the Federal Army’s capability, and they had done a particularly thorough job, twisting the rails so that they could not be used again and burning down bridges. Several miles of track had been put out of commission, but in response, Haupt performed what seemed to be a miracle. He rebuilt the railroad within two weeks, making it possible for a full complement of up to 20 trains per day to run on the line. His greatest achievement was to erect a 400-ft (120-m) trestle bridge high over the Potomac Creek in just nine days, even though he had only unskilled workers and poor, unseasoned wood at his disposal. This spectacular achievement was lauded by Lincoln when he visited the site: “I have seen the most remarkable structure that human eyes ever rested upon.” Perhaps unsurprisingly, however, the president only viewed the bridge from the embankment and did not venture over it.
Haupt’s talents included devising methods to destroy the enemy’s railroads, a task that proved to be just as important as repairing existing lines and building new ones. Thanks to Haupt’s principles, troop movements by rail were carried out without any major mishaps. The greatest movement of the war was when 23,000 men were needed to defend Tennessee after the defeat of the Federal Army at the Battle of Chickamauga in Georgia. The defeated army had retreated to Chattanooga, a rail hub in neighboring Tennessee, and needed reinforcements. In an extraordinary operation, involving seven railroads and two ferry trips, the reserve troops traveled 1,200 miles (1,950km) in just two weeks to relieve the siege of Chattanooga. The town then became a crucial stage for the Federal Army’s invasion of the South, which ended the war. That final push was also dependent on the railroads. When General Sherman left Chattanooga on his march to Atlanta, which signaled the end of the war, he relied on the railroad for supplies. He wrote after the war, with military precision:
That single stem of railroad [The Western and Atlantic] supplied an army of 100,000 men and 32,000 horses for the period of 196 days from May 1 to November 19 1864. To have delivered that amount of forage and food by ordinary wagons would have required 36,800 wagons, of six mules each… a simple impossibility in such roads as existed in that region.
A famous episode of the war—immortalized in The General, a 1926 Buster Keaton film—occurred on the railroads. A group of 21 Federal soldiers led by James Andrews penetrated enemy lines at Marietta, Georgia, and stole a train hauled by a locomotive called The General, with the intention of wrecking the Western and Atlantic Railroad. A Southern conductor, William Fuller, furious at the hijacking of his train, pursued the hijackers, first on foot, and then on a gandy dancers’ handcart (a device used for track maintenance). He eventually commandeered a locomotive and, evading the obstacles placed on the line by Andrews, caught up with The General when it ran out of fuel. The raiders fled into the countryside, but seven, including Andrews, were caught and hanged, while the rest escaped to the North. This, however, was a side-show. The lesson of the war was clear. Railroads were now invaluable military assets, and so they remained for 100 years or more.