Armoured train
For the most part, they were used during the late 19th and the early 20th centuries, when they offered an innovative way to quickly move large amounts of firepower into a new location.
One such example was the 'Littorina' armoured trolley which had a cab in the front and rear, each with a control set so it could be driven down the tracks in either direction.
During the Chinese Civil War, White Russian emigrants in the service of Marshal Zhang Zuchang built 14 armored trains in 1924–1928.
The most successful armed train was a single armoured wagon built to defend the Philadelphia, Wilmington and Baltimore Railroad.
The railroad had been attacked by southern forces to prevent transport of Union soldiers to the front, and snipers were discouraging men attempting to repair the damage.
In 1894, when he had become commanding officer of the 1st Sussex AV, railway workers among the volunteers of No 6 Garrison Company manned an armoured train constructed in the workshops of the London, Brighton and South Coast Railway (of which the unit's Honorary Colonel, Sir Julian Goldsmid, was a director).
[12][13][14] Recalling his experience in My Early Life, Churchill wrote "Nothing looks more formidable and impressive than an armoured train; but nothing is in fact more vulnerable and helpless.
[16] Two armoured trains were constructed at Crewe Works during 1915 for British coastal defense duties; one was based in Norfolk and one in Edinburgh to patrol rail routes on stretches of coast considered vulnerable to amphibious assault.
The intention was that the infantry, with artillery support from the train's guns, was to hold off a hostile landing force until reinforcements could be deployed.
[21] The Bolshevik forces in the Russian Civil War used a wide range of armoured trains, including Trotsky's one.
[23] Estonia built a total of 13 armoured trains during the Estonian War of Independence: six on broad-gauge and seven on narrow-gauge railways.
The first three armoured trains with fully volunteer crews formed the backbone of the front in critical early stages of conflict.
[25] The regiment was dissolved in 1940, after the USSR invaded the Baltic States, and its railway artillery cannons were transferred to the Soviet army.
They were used in China in the twenties and early thirties during the Chinese Civil War,[28] most notably by the warlord Zhang Zongchang, who employed refugee Russians to man them.
The Red Army had a large number of armoured trains at the start of World War II but many were lost in 1941.
[33] Canada used an armoured train to patrol the Canadian National Railway along the Skeena River from Prince Rupert, British Columbia to the Pacific coast, against a possible Japanese seaborne raid.
First in the 1920s, to guard the rail lines in Manchuria and later when they engaged Chinese NRA and CPC troops in Second Sino-Japanese War (1937–1945).
One of them was heavily involved in the Battle of the Alps, shelling French forts in support of an Italian attack towards Menton, and suffering heavy damage by return fire.
By 1943, eight trains had been deployed to Sicily; Allied air superiority did not allow them to have any meaningful role, and eventually they were all abandoned and destroyed by their crews.
[41] In the First Indochina War, the French Union used the armoured and armed train La Rafale as both a cargo-carrier and a mobile surveillance unit.
[49] During the Siege of Bihać in 1994, it was attacked on a few occasions with antitank rocket-propelled grenades and 76 mm guns and hit by a 9K11 Malyutka missile, but the damage was minor, as most of the train was covered with thick sheets of rubber which caused the missile's warhead to explode too early to do any real damage.
[48] The train was eventually destroyed by its own crew[citation needed] lest it fall into enemy hands during Operation Storm, Croatia's successful effort to reclaim the territories under occupation by Serbs.
The Army of Republika Srpska operated a similar train that was ambushed and destroyed in October 1992 at the entrance to the town of Gradačac by Bosnian Muslim forces that included a T-55 tank.
Facing the threat of Chinese cross-border raids during the Sino-Soviet split, the USSR developed armoured trains in the early 1970s to protect the Trans-Siberian Railway.
These trains were used by the Soviet Army to intimidate nationalist paramilitary units in 1990 during the early stages of the First Nagorno-Karabakh War.
[52][53] Towards the end of the Cold War, both superpowers began to develop railway-based ICBMs mounted on armoured trains; the Soviets deployed the SS-24 missile in 1987, but budget costs and the changing international situation led to the cancellation of the programme, with all remaining railway-based missiles finally being deactivated in 2005.
Outside of the formal Russian military hierarchy, Russian-backed militants in the Donbas region of Ukraine were pictured operating a homemade armoured train in late 2015.
[54] An armoured train made up of two diesel locomotives powering eight various railcars, which carried anti-aircraft weaponry and unknown cargo supported the southern flank of the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine.
[1][2] A Russian Railway Troops armoured train named Yenisei used in Ukraine was later reported in more detail; it was made up of two locomotives and eight cars.
