AS STRATEGIC ASSETS, railroads came of age during World War I. At the start of the war, they were used chiefly to transport troops as close to the front as possible, after which soldiers still had a long march to their posts, usually burdened with supplies and equipment. However, as the two sides fought themselves to a stalemate on the Western Front, smaller, narrow-gauge lines began to proliferate locally, serving as connections between the main lines and the trenches. The Germans, possibly having anticipated the stalemate, were better prepared than the Allies. They had stockpiled huge quantities of 2ft- (60cm-) gauge rail track, having devised the concept during a successful but bloody campaign to colonize South West Africa (now Namibia) in a three-year war that began in 1904. The Feldbahn—literally “field railways”—were very flexible, and could be laid very quickly to transport troops across the vast Namibian plains.
The Feldbahn trains carried both troops and supplies, and were powered by little steam—or even gasoline-driven—locomotives which, by virtue of having eight wheels, the leading and trailing pairs of which could swivel and move sideways, could cope with short-radius curves of track. They could also be hauled by horses, of which there were plenty in each infantry unit. When they invaded Belgium and France, the Germans took enough 2ft- (60cm-) gauge railroad equipment to lay several hundred miles of track. The French, too, were well prepared. They regarded themselves as the inventors of the mini-railroad, having used it extensively in their invasion of Morocco in 1911. And so, as soon as trenches began to be dug in 1914, the French brought some 400 miles (645km) of narrow-gauge track (manufactured by Decauville) out of storage. The standard French narrow-gauge locomotive was the Pechot double-truck, double-boiler, eight-wheeler, but this was soon supplemented by vast numbers of small, saddle-tank locomotives from the great US engine manufacturer Baldwin.
The Russians—despite the many inadequacies of their army and their preparation for war—had also anticipated the need for railroads, having used them in their war with Japan in 1904–05. In that conflict, they had built a 30-mile (48-km), horse-drawn, narrow-gauge line near Mukden, which had greatly facilitated troop deployment. In 1914, the Russian army had nine railroad battallions, of which three used narrow-gauge tracks. Once the Eastern Front, which was longer and more fluid than the Western Front, was established, a staggering number of lines were built. In addition to some 560 miles (900km) of preexisting track, a further 2,500 miles (4,000km) were laid, about half of which was used by horse-hauled trains, and most of the rest by steam engines. The Russians had the most need for this flexible railroad system, since they were fighting both the Germans and the Austrians across a wide swathe of Eastern Europe. The Austrians also had a well-developed field-railroad system, especially for their campaign in the south against Italy. In the mountains of the Dolomites, they added to the existing narrow-gauge lines—which were, in fact, slightly bigger than the standard 2ft (60cm), as they used a 2½ft- (75cm-) gauge—to keep their mountain troops supplied. As historian John Westwood writes in Railways at War:
Anticipating war in the Dolomites, the Austrians had realized that it would be hard to build standard-gauge lines on the Italian–Austrian front, so a proportionately heavier task had been allocated to the narrow-gauge lines, which were expected to be quite long. Indeed, in the long and usually fairly static campaign against Italy from 1915 to 1917, three substantial narrow-gauge lines were built by the Austrian army: the line from Auer to Predazzo, for instance, was thirty miles long, and included six tunnels and fourteen big bridges.
All of this was a far cry from the attitude of the British. British military strategists had expected a fluid war of movement, with troops attacking and counter-attacking each other across large areas, and so they were ill prepared when the Western Front became entrenched. According to a report into the British Army’s use of transportation during the war, the authorities could not believe that the stalemate would continue:
For the first two years of the war, the British transport arrangements were dominated by the idea that the war would soon revert to one of movement, that it was useless to embark on any large scheme which might be left far in the rear and become valueless before it had materialized, and become of use.
As a result, the British Army devoted more energy on trying to harness road transportation for the war effort than either their allies or their enemies. It was a hopeless task—what roads there were in rural France soon became impassable, and very often there were none to the front line. A British official report described the situation surprisingly eloquently:
… beyond the roads lay a nightmare quagmire of pulverized fields, ruined ditches, and flooded shell holes, threaded by temporary duckboard tracks and communications trenches. Through this muddy wasteland, every single item needed by the troops—food, water, clothing, medical supplies, tools, timber, barbed wire, mortars, machine guns, rifles, ammunition, and yet more ammunition—had to be carried.
It was an unedifying and perilous task. Hundreds of men died as they wandered off the duckboards in the dark and into flooded shell craters, where they were weighed down by their huge backpacks and drowned.
Narrow-gauge railroad lines were the perfect answer to this logistical problem. Their main advantage was that in the precarious conditions of the front line they were more flexible and efficient than any other form of transportation. They could be laid easily, with a minimum of ballast and only basic ties, and were also very easy to repair if they were shelled or damaged by the constant traffic they had to carry. As the name “field railway” implies, they could easily be lifted up and used elsewhere if the front line moved. The British, seeing the French success in using light railroads, belatedly began to develop their own from the summer of 1915.
The initial British light railroads were crude affairs that were mostly man-hauled, although mules were occasionally used. However, the beasts were at times reluctant to do their job, especially at night, when most of the operations were carried out. Far more sophisticated networks were later developed, and gradually two different types of narrow-gauge railroad emerged. The first type mainly ran from railheads to depots near the front line, and was normally worked by gasoline or gasoline-electric locomotives, or even steam engines in some cases. The second type of line—sometimes even narrower than 2-ft (60-cm) gauge, which made it seem almost like a toy train track—was a cruder design that reached right up to the trenches. Often called “tramways” by the British, these lines mostly used men or mules for traction, partly because they were so close to the enemy that the noise of the engines might attract attention and possible shellfire.
The two systems were supposed to be kept independent of each other, since the lines nearer the front were not sufficiently robust to carry the larger loads used by the lines from the railhead. All the lines were necessarily short, usually between 5 and 15 miles (8 and 24km) long, and required almost constant maintenance. Derailments were common, particularly when tanks and artillery were being transported, and were usually dealt with by manpower alone—a few men would be called upon to heave the engines or cars back onto the tracks.
Trains were forced to operate under the cover of darkness, and the only light—if one were used at all, which was impossible near the front—was the size of a small flashlight. Yet nearly all the lines were single-track, and there was no signaling system, so operations were carried out on a “line of sight” system. This meant that the engineers had to stay constantly alert, checking whether there was a train ahead that had unexpectedly halted or broken down. A telegraph system could be used to contact the rail traffic controller, but only if there were problems. The unsophisticated nature of the system is best revealed by the fact that the engineers often had to resort to finding water for their steam locomotives from the nearest shell hole, as there was often no other water source. One harebrained idea inspired by the lack of rolling stock was to adapt Model T Ford automobiles. They were fixed to a rail chassis, but proved too light for the task—they slipped on the rails due to insufficient adhesion, so the idea was abandoned.
Given the poor state of the lines and the frequent use of men or mules, speeds were very slow. Nevertheless, these little toy-town railroads were infinitely better than any other form of transportation at the front. There were, though, limitations. The maximum load of a narrow-gauge train was 30 tons (33.5 tonnes) and consequently, when supplies were transferred at the railhead, at least ten such trains were required to take the load from one mainline service. Nevertheless, the lines carried huge loads. An officer of the railroad corps reckoned that one line could carry up to 1,200 tons (1,340 tonnes) of materials each night, representing up to 150 trains each run by a couple of men. Even large guns were carried, often straddling more than one car. Toward the end of the war, a new use was found for the lines: field guns were set up on cars, enabling the gun to be moved after a few shots were fired, thus preventing the enemy from locating them. And it was not only ammunition and supplies that were carried—whenever possible, the trains carried troops to and from the front, saving the men hours of trudging through heavy mud where, in darkness, they risked falling into shell holes.
John Westwood concludes that “all the belligerents, even the Germans, made greater use of the narrow-gauge railways than they had expected.” This was partly as a result of the stalemate that lasted for three and a half years on the Western Front, but also because of the state of transportation technology at the time. Field trains were an ideal solution for the logistical problems of the war’s muddy battlefields, and they became ubiquitous. It was only when the Germans, at last, broke through the lines in the spring of 1918 and the Allies then counter-attacked that the lines lost their purpose. Because of their temporary nature, very few survive today, with just a handful of sections of line in northern France preserved to show what Les Petits Trains, as the French call them, achieved in that terrible conflict.