Railways and Railwaymen Called to Action Railways of the Great War with Michael Portillo

World War I was a railway war.

I'm going to find out

how the railways helped to precipitate a mechanised war...

..defined how it was fought...

..conveyed millions to the trenches...

..and bore witness to its end.

I've taken to historic tracks

to rediscover the locomotives and wagons

of the war that was supposed to end all war.

And to hear the stories of the gallant men and women

who used them in life and in death.

The Germans had planned a swift, mobile war,

making use of the railways

but by autumn 1914, both sides were bogged down in the trenches

and the stalemate began to take its relentless toll.

In this programme, I'm in the Northeast of England

to find out about the brave railwaymen

who made the ultimate sacrifice...

One of them in particular is a Private F Bayes

who had joined the 17th Battalion Northumberland Fusiliers

and was killed in action on July 1st,

the first day of the Battle of the Somme.

In Oxfordshire,

where railways helped turn a munitions crisis into victory...

In 1918 on the 29th of September,

we fire just shy of one million shells in 24 hours

in the assault on the Hindenburg Line.

Terrifying.

And I'll encounter the railway guns

that helped to turn the tide of war.

My goodness, one shell, 400 casualties.

Today, I'll be travelling the length of England, from Gateshead

to the railway museum at York, south to a munitions factory in Banbury

and on to the big guns on the south coast

to find out how the railways rose to the challenge

of the logistics of total war.

Britain began the war with a tiny professional army,

most of which went to the continent where it suffered terrible losses.

The secretary of state for war, General Lord Kitchener,

launched an enormous recruitment drive to encourage men to believe

that it was their patriotic duty to enlist.

He sought that bands of friends and colleagues

should sign up together to form "Pals battalions"

and the call was answered with gusto by north-east Railwaymen.

Compared to the vast armies

of France, Germany and Russia, millions strong,

British forces were tiny.

There were just 247,000 in the regular army.

As one of the country's foremost industries,

the railways employed a vast, skilled workforce,

particularly in the Northeast.

I'm making my way

to the Tanfield Heritage Railway line, south of Gateshead,

to meet living history enthusiast, Rob Langham.

-Rob, hello.

-Hi, Michael.

I find you poignantly dressed in First World War kit.

Actually, what uniform are you wearing?

This is the uniform of the 17th Battalion Northumberland Fusiliers,

who were the North Eastern Railways Battalion.

So when the war broke out,

did the railwaymen in the north-east enlist with enthusiasm?

Yes, within just a few weeks of the outbreak of the war,

1 in 10 of the men had already joined the armed forces.

War fever had gripped the nation.

Half a million British men joined up in the first month

and the "Pals battalions" were a great recruiting success.

Just four days after the outbreak of war,

over 2,000 reservists from the North Eastern Railways

had left their jobs for the army.

By the end of August 1914, 3,500 workers had joined up.

So, so given that these railwaymen were specialists

and that railways were going to play a very important part in the war,

do you think that the authorities were a bit slow

to recognise the value of railwaymen at the front?

I suppose with the benefit of hindsight we could say so,

but at the time when the services were offered,

it was still a war of movement.

We didn't know which way it was going to go,

they didn't really expect to see the trench lines come up

and there was a vague hope that it would be over by Christmas.

It wasn't.

And by November 1915,

the battalion's full training was complete

and they were deployed to the Somme valley as pioneers,

building vital infrastructure such as trenches and supply roads.

When the first assault finally came on 1st July 1916,

it was a bloodbath.

While the railwaymen attempted to dig new trenches

behind the advancing troops,

they were hindered by the piled up dead and wounded.

As the Somme campaign dragged on into the autumn, it became clear

that the railway supply network was hopelessly inadequate.

The 17th Northumberland Fusiliers were ideal candidates

to form a new Railway Battalion.

I'm imagining that when the railwaymen are doing their proper work at the front,

building and maintaining railways,

some of that must be in very dangerous and appalling conditions.

Certainly, yes, they were still at risk of gassing, shelling,

even long range machine gun fire.

As well as that,

when doing narrow gauge work on the Passchendaele salient

it was still extremely muddy, absolutely full of shell holes.

You've got old trenches, old dugouts to contend with as well.

They were going over absolutely destroyed ground

that the British and Germans had fought over previously.

The North Eastern Railway company didn't forget

the valiant sacrifices their employees were making at the front.

Do we know the individual stories

of railwaymen who served with the NER Battalion?

Well, there is a few.

The North Eastern Railway published a magazine from 1911 onwards

but continued to do so throughout the war years.

They also included, a lot more sadly, the roll of honour,

of men from the North Eastern Railway who had been killed.

One of them in particular is a Private F Bayes,

who had joined the 17th battalion Northumberland Fusiliers.

According to the magazine, previous to enlisting he was employed as a wagon builder at York

and was killed in action on July 1st,

the first day of the Battle of the Somme.

"He was 27 years of age

"and had been in the company service 13 years.

"Four of his brothers, it may be mentioned, are in the army,

"three of them being at the front."

It's a frightful thought, isn't it,

that one mother has five sons there in the war,

four of them at the front, one now already dead.

But it brings them back to life, doesn't it, being able to see their photograph?

It certainly does, and in many cases,

this is most likely the only photographs of these men that remain in the world.

Though their work was dangerous,

the Railway Battalion didn't generally work on the front line,

so their death toll was relatively low.

They lost a total of 112 men,

while infantry units, like the Leeds Pals battalion,

suffered 750 casualties out of 900

and the Sheffield pals were disbanded

because the casualties were so high.

And the ones who had survived, did they go back to railway work?

Most of them, yes.

In cases where the men were wounded too badly to return to that work,

the North Eastern Railway tried to find a way

to get them back into a lighter role but still working in the railways.

So their employer did recognise the terrific job they'd done on the Western Front.

-And this, I think, is your train.

-It certainly is.

Thank you very much indeed, have a good journey.

The train companies provided enthusiastic,

skilled recruits to the depleted British Army,

but the primary job of the railway

was to move men and kit to the front.

This was a war that some had believed

would be over by Christmas 1914.

But by 1915, the army was short of more than just men.

I think I can envisage how trains conveyed

soldiers to the front, even by the million.

But once the war became dug into trenches,

pounding the enemy with artillery

offered the only hope for each side for breaking the stalemate.

What defies my imagination is the manufacture

of millions of tons of shells

and their transport to the front by railway.

I'm travelling to a field

just outside the Oxfordshire town of Banbury

to meet a military historian fascinated by how we met that challenge,

so much so he's earned the nickname "Mr Logistics", Rob Thompson.

Rob, a muddy field by the M40 motorway,

but what was this during World War I?

During WW1 this would not have been a muddy field,

this would have been National Filling Factory Number 9,

a shell-filling factory which was absolutely vital to the war effort.

Early in the conflict, the War Office

asked the railway companies to make munitions,

such as gun carriages, in their workshops.

They had the capacity and the skills to be able to turn their hand

to just about any manufacturing output on a giant scale.

But soon everyone's mind was on ammunition.

In 1915 we reached the shells crisis,

that's where we were firing only four shells per gun per day

By way of contrast,

the Germans were firing over 180 shells per gun per day.

When news of the shells crisis broke, scandal rocked the nation.

Railway companies turned over their locomotive works

to shell production, while a new "Ministry for Munitions"

set up shell-filling stations in places like Banbury,

which was chosen for its central location and excellent rail links.

From here, shells could be transported to the north-east and Scotland

or southwards to Southampton.

It was built around the railways,

the wagons would come in with the component materials,

the wagons would leave with the filled shells,

those wagons would continue to the ports of the English Channel,

they would move onto ships themselves, still on their rails,

across the Channel, off at the other end

and would go directly to the guns at the front, never leaving the rails.

Here there's a bit of brickwork left,

do you know what this would have been?

Well, this would have been where they brought the trolleys through

for bringing the shell components in in the first place.

And what do you feel when you come to a place like this?

To me, this is not a dead site, it's not a muddy field

or just some old brick works, to me this is living history.

History is an exercise in the imagination

and what I hear is the sound of the girls coming to work giggling,

the clanking of the wagons and they come through,

Wow, you've brought it alive, you really have.

It's never occurred to me to ask

how you actually make a shell, but I guess you're going to tell me?

Yeah, well, the process is very simple,

however, it's precision that matters.

This is a shell, this one is a shrapnel shell,

but we're going to be using it to show a high explosive work,

it consists of a cartridge, which is this,

a shell body, which is this,

made out of steel, and a fuse, which is what sets it off.

OK, so this would be the cordite.

It's very similar to spaghetti, in fact.

It would be bundled in red ribbons,

placed inside the cartridge of the shell itself,

the cartridge will be on top, like so...

Inside the shell would be poured molten picric acid, known as lyddite,

A very yellowy colour.

This would be poured in, again, very precisely.

Now who's doing all this pouring, munitions workers,

so what sort of people are they?

Many of them are women.

They've never had the opportunity of employment before

and also on top of that,

I feel that they would have realised

they were doing something for the war effort as well,

helping their men at the front.

Government Minister, David Lloyd George,

had called on suffragette Emmeline Pankhurst

to help to recruit his new workforce.

She organised a rally in July 1915

championing "Women's Right to Serve."

Hundreds of thousands answered the call.

"I had never been in a factory before

"and a friend and I thought to ourselves, well,

"let's do something."

The women were known as "munitionettes",

but they soon earned another nickname.

It was dangerous work with toxic chemicals including TNT,

which turned their skin and hair bright yellow,

so they were called "the canaries."

So were they quite safety conscious in these factories?

They were extremely safety conscious in these factories.

Not necessarily for the benefit

or the health and safety of the workers themselves,

but to keep production flowing.

Production was everything.

Lethal explosions could be caused by dropping a shell,

so the system at Banbury ensured munitions were always transported on trolleys

and never lifted or lowered.

The production process was seamless.

And it did the job.

By the last year of the war the shells crisis was a distant memory.

By 1917, they're fighting what becomes known as an "artillery gourmet's war."

At one particular battle, the battle of Messines,

we fire 144,000 tons of shells,

that's about a ton every two or three seconds.

We cap this in 1918, on 29th September,

we fire just shy of one million shells in 24 hours

in the assault on the Hindenburg Line.

Terrifying.

Absolutely.

Throughout all this, the railway companies had worked

side by side with the Ministry of Munitions,

transporting supplies and helping to manufacture shells.

Without the railways,

it wouldn't have been possible to re-arm the front on such a lethal scale.

Since Britain began the war with a tiny army,

the railways had an obvious role

in the rapid expansion of our continental forces.

But they were also vital to the war at sea.

The Royal Navy was the world's largest

and its dreadnoughts ran on steam,

for which they needed reliable supplies of coal.

The trains were known as "Jellicoe Specials",

after Admiral Jellicoe. They carried hundreds of tons of coal

from South Wales to Grangemouth

from where it was conveyed to the battleships in the Orkneys.

The entire British rail network was feeding the voracious war machine.

British railway expertise was also in demand on the Western Front.

My journey take me to Longmoor in Hampshire.

Given the strategic importance of railways,

the British Army had to sustain its resources of specialised man-power.

I'm standing above Longmoor camp

where soldiers were taught about railways

and where railwaymen learned to be soldiers.

Not far from Longmoor lives Tony Rudgard,

the proud son of one of those First World War Royal Engineers.

Tony, which of these fine men is your father Harold?

He's in the centre, this was taken in 1917 in France.

He was superintendent of the Fourth Army Light Railway

and they were delivering goods and ammunition to the front.

Harold Rudgard had joined the Midland Railway

as an apprentice in 1900.

When did your father join the armed forces?

In 1914, he was with the 5th Battalion Sherwood Foresters.

So in that role,

he had no opportunity to apply his railway expertise?

No, he wasn't. But he was a machine gun officer.

And he did that until he was wounded in Sanctuary Wood in France.

It was only after he'd recovered from his injuries

that he became involved in training at Longmoor.

He was then promoted to major

and became a superintendent for the railway in France.

His main job was to keep the traffic moving.

200,000 tons of goods were transported per week in France.

If an engine failed, they wouldn't worry,

they'd just push it off the line.

They'd come back the next day and take it up.

Cos they had to get the traffic through to the sidings.

And here's a letter dated 17th November 1918, from whom is it?

It's from my grandfather, Edward Rudgard,

to my father, Harold Rudgard.

This was dated five days after the armistice was signed.

-Do you mind if I read a little of it?

-Yes, certainly.

"My dear son,

"I feel I cannot allow this great and wonderful week to pass

"without sending you a few words of hearty congratulation.

"What a joy it has brought to millions and millions

"and we who are spared to rejoice must always keep in our hearts

"a place for those dear ones who nobly and cheerfully died

"that England may live,

"and for those who joined up for Love of the Cause..."

Capital L, capital C.

"I shall be pleased to hear that a grateful country

"will very shortly allow you

"to resume your work on the Midland Railway.

"May you have good health and deserved success in life.

"I am your affectionate father, Edward Rudgard."

It's quite a letter, isn't it?

Yes, it was. They felt things very strongly in those days.

It was the work of men like Harold Rudgard

that kept vital supply lines open,

delivering men and munitions to the front.

As the preeminent role of artillery in the war became ever clearer,

the front line demanded not only more shells, but ever bigger guns.

Machines so colossal and difficult to manoeuvre

that they could be built only as massive railway wagons.

Travelling on down to the South Coast,

I've come to Fort Nelson near Portsmouth,

home of the "big guns"

to see for myself one of those monstrous machines

in the company of curator Phil MacGrath

Well, Phil,

we are staring at the business end of the most colossal barrel.

-What is it?

-It's an 18-inch railway Howitzer,

and here we have one of the rounds used for firing.

That's over a ton in weight,

which would have caused quite a serious amount of damage.

Why did the British Army demand railway-mounted guns of this size?

The requirement was for a much larger destructive fire power

against key targets, like the very important Hindenburg Line.

The Hindenburg Line

was Germany's main line of defence on the Western Front,

stretching from the north coast of France

to the Belgian border near Verdun.

Heavily fortified, it could only be overcome only

through massive artillery bombardment.

This enormous gun obviously cannot be conveyed on roads,

was it manoeuvrable by rail?

Yes, Michael, in fact the service wagon was much larger than this,

yet still relatively transportable by rail.

So they could get it to the front

and then could they get it going pretty quickly?

Yes, within a reasonable amount of time.

It's hard to imagine that the wagons in World War I

were even bigger than this, this weighs what?

This is 180 tons.

I've heard about guns with wonderful names like Bosch-buster

and Scene-shifter, what sort of guns were they?

Well these were actually the service wagons,

and the gun barrel that they housed was the 14 inch gun barrel.

So a tiny bit smaller than this but nonetheless, massive.

Yes, indeed.

On one famous occasion in 1918,

King George V visited the front to witness this leviathan in action.

They settled on a railway junction as the target

at a place called Douai, and a troop train, by all accounts,

was destroyed with 400 casualties.

My goodness, one shell, 400 casualties?

Incredible destructive power.

Were there limitations to using these guns?

Yes, of course, these were open to aerial bombardment,

but also there was a problem on traversing the gun barrel.

Ah, because it didn't swivel, of course.

So what did you do about that?

The way that they overcame that

was to position the gun on a curved section of line.

So all you had to do

was just trundle a few hundred tons worth of gun

round to the right point of the curve and fire away?

Yes indeed.

The First World War was won with artillery

and that came at a price.

The number of casualties was immense

and in the vital work of tending to the wounded,

the railways also played their part.

I'm travelling back north, to the cathedral city of York

and a magnet for British railway enthusiasts,

the National Railway Museum.

The Railway Gazette, dated 1920.

"A well organised system of hospital trains

"nowadays enables the worst cases

"to be brought in a few hours from the field to the hospital.

"It is pleasing that in addition to its role as a weapon of offence,

"the railway serves to reduce death and suffering."

I'm interested to see how in World War I,

the train fulfilled its mission of mercy,

giving the hope to wounded men of a return to health and to home.

I'm meeting Medic and First World War scholar Dr Malcolm Timperley

and archivist Alison Kay to find out about hospital trains.

-Good to see you. Malcolm, hello.

-Hello, welcome to the National Railway Museum.

I'm delighted to be here.

Prior to World War I,

what experience had the British had with ambulance trains?

The British experience was really in the Boer War.

A couple were constructed and shipped out to South Africa,

but from that they decided that what they really needed to do

was make some plans

because they believed that a European war was on the way.

And when the war kicks off at the beginning of August,

the plan is implemented immediately?

The day after.

And as you can see over here, they were very good plans

because the order went out on the 5th of August 1914,

and exactly three weeks later here is a picture

of the first train leaving Dukinfield, near Manchester,

en route for Southampton, so within three weeks, it's running.

I'm quite impressed by this

because I think of Britain as being not very well organised

at the beginning of the war. But here's a plan that's working out.

These plans show that the standard ambulance train

had accommodation for around 400 injured soldiers,

39 medical personnel and 8 other staff.

The train generated its own electricity

while all carriages were steam heated.

You get these amazing wards that are full of freshly linened sheets,

you get flowers shown as well.

So you would be quite pleased, really,

if your son or your husband

was travelling back on one of these trains, I think.

You'd even, in a railway carriage, this is a staff car,

be able to take a bath.

You can see here the water heater coming straight from the train

that would heat your bath whilst you were sitting in it.

That doesn't sound too bad, does it?!

It doesn't. But plans are one thing and reality another.

What was the reality? Was it different?

It was very different. It was pretty grim.

The trains are designed for about 400 patients.

In fact we have many reports of them taking 800 and occasionally more.

You're looking at an environment

with an awful lot of very badly wounded guys.

Many of whom have infections and, to be honest,

one of the major problems is the smell that that generates.

That a lot of these guys had laid in shell craters

for 2 or 3 days before they even got to medical help.

The trains smelt awful.

Most people were actually smoking.

It made it more pleasant for people

to actually be in this thick fog of smoke

which is completely, completely, different from what you might imagine

from the official photographs with the flowers.

Artillery, machine guns, barbed wire and poison gas

caused new and horrifying injuries.

Infection festered.

This was before the advent of antibiotics,

so much of the work involved dressing wounds

or dealing with severe pain and high fever.

Working conditions were terrible

and staff would go without sleep for days.

By the end of the war,

2.6 million injured troops had been transported

in 49 ambulance trains on nearly 8,000 journeys.

It's a pretty grim picture.

Do we, do we learn something as a nation,

does medicine learn something from these ambulance trains?

This was one of the first times when it was actually realised

that there are some parts of healthcare that you have to organise

from the top, centrally,

and ultimately, from that, came the kind of systems that we have today.

So apparently, out of all that horror came the kernel of the idea

that would become the National Health Service.

At the time of World War I,

the railways were at their peak.

Because their managers ran such complex organisations,

they were enlisted to boost the supply of shells

and their delivery to the front line.

Ordinary railwaymen who'd joined pals battalions

found their practical skills in demand, both at home and abroad.

The ambulance trains were another railway success,

although they would eventually be overwhelmed

by the unimaginable level of casualties.

Next time, I'll be getting hands-on experience

of the narrow tracks and trains

that kept supplies flowing to the front line...

-Ready, lift!

-Whoa!

..uncovering the story of the war's forgotten railway poet...

"Blasphemer braggart and coward all..."

-It's quite strong stuff, isn't it?

-It is, yes.

..and commemorating the many soldiers killed

in a horrific railway accident on British soil.

It was a disaster almost waiting to happen,

and it happened here on that fateful Saturday morning.