Armoured trains of Poland

[1] From 1918 through 1920 the newly created Polish Army received about 90 armored trains, mostly from workshops in Kraków, Nowy Sącz, Lwów (Lviv), Warsaw and Wilno (Vilnius).

[2] Many of them were classified as improvised, and consisted of regular trains and wagons armored with metal gates, cement and sandbags; the soldiers called them "mobile trenches".

[2] Several armored trains fought supporting the Polish forces in the Greater Poland uprising (1918–9)[3] and the Polish-Ukrainian War (1918–19).

Approximately 50 armored trains participated in that conflict on the Polish side; on average, about twenty were in active service at any given time.

[4] Around the mid-1930s, revisions to Poland's tactical and strategic doctrines meant that armored trains, previously considered a high-quality force, begun to be seen as increasingly obsolete on the battlefield.

[4] The command of the Land Coastal Defence decided to field improvised trains to bolster its defenses.

[5] They played a significant role in several encounters, most notably, no 53 made an important contribution to the Polish victory in the Battle of Mokra, and no 54 was used very successfully in the defense of Silesia.

[5] The successful role of the armored trains, considered obsolete by both Polish and German strategists, caused the revision of that judgment by both sides.

[8] After the war, in the Republic of Poland, Railroad Guards (Straż Ochrony Kolei) used four armored trains from 1945 to 1950.