How important are railways for miliary operations today?

[Serafina]

Since there has been an extensive discussion (or rather explanation) of the importance of railways systems for the logistics in WW II, i wanted to ask how important they remain today. First for the small wars that are actually fought these days (Afghanistan, Irak, similar conflicts) and second in case of a war between two major countries.
And what conclusions can we draw from their importance or lack thereof?

[Zinegata]

The two most efficient ways of transporting large amounts of hardware are via railroads and ships. If World War 3 broke out tomorrow and it's in the form of a gazillion Chinese/Russian/NEW SOVIET UNION tanks rushing over the border of a country, railroads and ships will be very vital.

In the current conflict, railroads aren't used very much simply because neither Afghanistan nor Iraq have extensive railroad systems. However, this has also resulted in skyrocketing costs for the US Army logistics - as they're forced to rely on trucks (often IED'd and have bad mileage anyway) or air transport (really expensive) to move stuff anywhere. I suspect that's why the Iraq War has hit over a trillion dollars in cost despite the US Army not dropping a whole lot of bombs after 2004.

[Temujin]

They are certainly still important as no land based transportation (nor air based for that matter) method can match the sheer volume of freight that can easily be transported.

The problem is they can be very vulnerable to disruption, especially by modern weapon systems.

I would say in the first case where the US has military dominance and air supremacy, they can be very useful. Disruption by insurgents should be minor at best. Though off hand I don't know much about the current state of the Iraqi railway system, I know they had some major lines running between the major cities. IIRC, Afghanistan had hardly any functional railroads a few years back, but supposedly there has been a push to build new lines; not sure how that's going.

In the second case, I think rail lines on both sides would be quickly targeted and disrupted. The side that gains the upper hand and achieves air supremacy will of course have a better opportunity to repair their lines and put them to use, which will only further their chance for a decisive victory. Of course if we're talking traditional World War 3 in Europe, I think the sheer volume of firepower thrown around would pretty much destroy any rail lines to such a degree as to be inoperable for the duration of the conflict.

[Zinegata]

Correct me if I'm wrong here - I don't even remember which book I read this from (but I suspect it's Overy's Why the Allies Won again).

During the lead up to D-Day (June 1944) the Allies launched an extensive campaign to destroy the German and French railroad systems. They were so effective that German Divisions took weeks to reach the front instead of the days it would have taken by rail.

However, the campaign is notable in that they used both heavy bombers and tactical bombers. The former carpet-bombed entire sections of the railroad to oblivion, while the latter focused on taking out key chokepoints in the system - bridges, tunnels, and the like.

After the war, it was determined by everyone concerned (including the pilots), that the carpet-bombing proved to be an enormous waste of resources that had little effect. The problem was the sheer density of railroads in the West. Even if one section was bombed into oblivion, others would remain operational and trains could be rerouted through them. By the time you bombed these other areas, the damage from the original attacks would have already been repaired.

In contrast, the damage done by the tactical bombers was not easily repaired and caused massive snarl ups all over the line. Bridges could not be easily rebuilt. Collapsed tunnels have to be laboriously dug open again. The tactical bombers were thus among the true unsung heroes that made the invasion possible.

Using this as a case study, how would things change in the modern day?

In a Big War (Warsaw Pact Invasion Style)

With the advent of stealth aircraft and precision munitions, the US Air Force should be able to apply the same strategy as the tactical bombers of D-Day - and to much greater effect. Tom Clancy's fantasy scenario in Red Storm Rising (wherein the NATO Air Forces launch a massive early air strike lead by stealth aircraft, which blunts the Soviet second echelon) may not seem so fantastical after all.

Less advanced Air Forces could also wreak havoc on foes... as long as they have little or no Air Defense.

However, it must be noted that "Big War" forces now often include organic resupply elements (i.e. Fuel trucks). Still, the supplies they carry are limited, and after a couple of weeks the frontline forces will find themselves in very dire need of resupply.

In a Little War (Afghanistan/Iraq)

The problem in the "current conflicts" is that the rail network isn't dense enough to allow for redundancy. If insurgents blow up a rail line, it's probably the only rail line in the entire area.

Thus, forces have to be assigned to guard the entire railroad (very manpower-inefficient), which is very bad for an occupying force.

[Stuart]

Though off hand I don't know much about the current state of the Iraqi railway system, I know they had some major lines running between the major cities. IIRC, Afghanistan had hardly any functional railroads a few years back, but supposedly there has been a push to build new lines; not sure how that's going.

Afghanistan has no functional railways and 12,350 km of paved roads (plus 29.800 km of unpaved roads).

Iraq has 2,272 km of railways in 1.435 meter gauge. It has 37,851 km of paved roads and 7,049 km of unpaved roads.

As for their importance, railways are still critical for shifting supplies. Road transport is short-limbed unless very high incidental costs are accepted (and a lot of trucks are available; even then the distance that a truck lift can be effective is limited to around 800 km tops and in the upper quarter of that the number of trucks needed and their failure rate are terrifying.

[LionElJonson]

Wouldn't a railway be rather vulnerable to any random insurgent with an IED and a shovel? Just go out, bury the IED under the metal track, and then blow said track up. Then you just sit back and wait for the next train to come thundering along and derail when it hits the damaged track.

I suppose they could just send regular patrols along the line to check the integrity of the track, but that's both expensive and predictable, allowing the insurgents to launch another attack on your railway checker cars (probably by planting IEDs next to the track). Otherwise, you'd think the first they'd know of a damaged track is when a train hits it and derails.

[Cecelia5578]

In the United States, we have something called STRACNET, http://www.globalsecurity.org/military/ ... racnet.htm, which sorta gives some idea about how the Pentagon views railroads.

Its not something I normally care about, but its a straw that opponents of high speed rail on the SF Peninsula have been using, since most HSR plans envision getting rid of the dwindling freight trains that still use the Peninsula route.

Here, at least, it seems to be a Cold War relic for back when the Bay Area actually had military bases (and no, Moffett Field doesn't really count), and all you have left nowadays are NG and Reserve units.

Considering you have the larger Port of Oakland right across the bay, I'd say its a relic.

[Sea Skimmer]

Wouldn't a railway be rather vulnerable to any random insurgent with an IED and a shovel? Just go out, bury the IED under the metal track, and then blow said track up. Then you just sit back and wait for the next train to come thundering along and derail when it hits the damaged track.

That’s really no different then planting a bomb along a road and then blowing up a passing truck. If the track is already broken then it’s actually going to be very easy to spot the damage from the air. Spotting IEDs along roads from the air… well methods exist but none of them are easy or simple. In reality though you can damage railroad track effectively without explosives. A big threat is people just pull the spikes out, leaving the rail in place. When a train rolls past it will derail. However this damage is also very easy to repair, and UAV recon can still spot people doing it fairly easily.

A bigger problem is loss of railroad bridges, as they are not as easily replaced as road bridges. Nor can the train be diverted easily unless you have a very dense railroad system. Diversion is an option in a place like Europe or the US or China, forcing the destruction of dozens of bridges to halt all traffic, but it won’t work in a place like Iraq when the railroad system is based around one single track line with some branch lines. Only a few nations still have military railroad bridging kits anymore too (a mistake with so much emphasis on nation building and COIN now). The Iraqi railroad system was down for most of the war because a single key bridge near Baghdad got blown up several times in a row and it generally just wasn’t felt to be worth the trouble of guarding. But then Iraq is small enough for trucks to be effective.

The only way you will keep supply lines open in the face of lots insurgents is with heavy patrolling and a major commitment of resources. That’s just reality. A train however has a major advantage in that locomotives consume much less fuel per ton-mile of freight moved. One train getting through means a lot more then one truck convoy. You can reduce the derailing risk by going slow. Also it helps that today we have truck mobile cranes that can lift locomotives and put them back on the rails. Back in WW2 you had to bring up a railroad crane to do that, which means you had to clear away the part of the train that didn't derail first. This is slow work and often meant rail cars and locomotives simply got abandon besides the tracks.

Currently the US Army Reserve still has one railroad operating battalion, so its not an ignored option. One battalion might sound small, but it’s enough to operate several hundred miles of track and several marshalling yards. It was not deployed to Iraq because we found enough local personal willing to work for us. British Army engineers did operate the railroad system around Um Quasr for a while.

Absurdly in the Cold War the USAF actually did consider dedicated anti train cruise missiles. One option was a missile that dropped a stick of heavy mines across the tracks, which would detonate together as a train passed over. The other option was simply a missile that flew down the tracks and automatically identified and attacked locomotives. The idea was to halt the flow of reinforcements from western Russia to Germany. The Russians had no less then EIGHT different kinds of military railroad bridges, including railroad pontoon bridges so we could not rely on bridge busting to halt railroad operations. One example is the NZhM-56 pontoon bridge, which NATO rates as MLC120. This is enough for traincars loaded with battle tanks or medium sized locomotives. One bridge kit can span a 600 meter gap in 24 hours of work and all components are moved by normal 6x6 trucks, though of course you could use more then one kit to cross larger rivers. Other kits are more like trestles for crossing deep gaps on which a pontoon bridge would be useless.

[FSTargetDrone]

This discussion reminds me of the stories my father told me about how he, as a young boy growing up in Philadelphia, saw numerous trains laden with military equipment coming from the west, heading east to the ports on the coast during the Korean War and later the Vietnam War.

On a related note, I found a Flickr photoset featuring abandoned US Military rail cars sitting next to the old tracks of the old East Broadtop Railroad in Mount Union, Pennsylvania:

[Zaune]

I'm pretty sure the British military still has its own railheads at a few major bases, and a couple of shunters.
And the small number of key chokepoints in a railway network compared to roads also make them simpler to defend; a developed country's road network has so many points of failure that even a token air-defence presence for all of them would be a hopeless task.

[Thanas]

The same is also true for any modern railroad, especially with the insane amount of difficult to replace bridges, tunnels etc.

Roads are harder to take out as a whole because of the redundancy, but you can halt a train by simply blowing up the track.

[HMS Conqueror]

Not that important thanks to motor vehicles, just as for civilian transportation. But useful, for sure, at least provided that the two powers have a land border. Not sure when that's going to happen; it's not like there's any great economic value or transport infrastructure in the Russian Far East.

[Zaune]

The same is also true for any modern railroad, especially with the insane amount of difficult to replace bridges, tunnels etc.

I'd have to look this up, but I would be extremely surprised the number of mainline railway junctions and bridges exceed a tenth the number of their road equivalents in Western Europe. Hell, a lot of British motorways have a bridge over them every mile or two; a determined Special Forces team with a stolen car and a couple of hundred kilos of plastic explosive could cause havoc.

Roads are harder to take out as a whole because of the redundancy, but you can halt a train by simply blowing up the track.

True, but railway traffic is controlled by the signalling system, so it's possible to re-route trains around a blockage or hold them over where they won't conflict with other trains going elsewhere. Roads have several hundred thousand individual drivers working independently, probably at cross-purposes.
And it would take Salvation War levels of petrol rationing before we had any redundant capacity in our motorway network to speak of anyway.

[Sea Skimmer]

I'd have to look this up, but I would be extremely surprised the number of mainline railway junctions and bridges exceed a tenth the number of their road equivalents in Western Europe. Hell, a lot of British motorways have a bridge over them every mile or two; a determined Special Forces team with a stolen car and a couple of hundred kilos of plastic explosive could cause havoc.

If you knock down a road bridge you can emplace a pontoon bridge replacement within hours and plow a dirt spur road at each end with a bulldozer. Replacing a railroad bridge, even with one of the Russian's very rare railway pontoon bridges will take at least a day. That assumes the approaches allow it. Remember road traffic can go up and down steep slopes pretty easily. But you can't just lay railroad track anywhere you want. You've got some very constricted grade and side slope stability requirements. The Soviets actually prebuilt spur tracks to reach preplanned railroad pontoon bridge sites, but no one else was crazy prepared enough for that.

True, but railway traffic is controlled by the signalling system, so it's possible to re-route trains around a blockage or hold them over where they won't conflict with other trains going elsewhere. Roads have several hundred thousand individual drivers working independently, probably at cross-purposes.
And it would take Salvation War levels of petrol rationing before we had any redundant capacity in our motorway network to speak of anyway.

Signaling systems are BAD today for surviving attack. Way worse then what existed in WW2 because they rely on just a few computerized central traffic control centers. A few smart bombs blow up those centers and you have nothing left. All the old individual signal boxes linked to specific interlocking systems are gone and indeed some modern switches can't even be thrown manually by a guy standing by the track. To make matters worse modern train systems tend to have fewer switches and fewer if longer sidings, leading less auxiliary means of bypassing localized breaks and generally handling unplanned traffic. Railroads have a vital limitation in that you can't just get a train off the tracks. With trucks on the road, you can always pull onto the shoulder (other then insane mountain roads ect..) while a train needs a siding. If you get too many trains crammed on one area of track traffic just totally halts because you can't put them anywhere.

Railroads do have some redundancy usually, but that depends on who's railroad it is. You go to Iraq for example, they have a useful railroad system but blowing one bridge can cut Basra from Baghdad. Nothing bypasses this single track constriction. Roads are highly redundant because they are just inherently far more extensive in scope then even the grandest pre WW1 height of the railroad and tramway systems in the eastern US and western Europe. It used to be you could lay narrow gauge low axle weight railroad pretty easily, but that just won't meet modern military requirements.

Field pipelines are unsung hero's though, a 12in pipe of diesel fuel can go a long way towards solving an Army fuel shortage. But such pipelines are highly exposed to insurgents to the point of being useless.

[Zaune]

Good point about signalling centres, actually; that hadn't occurred to me. Though setting up an alternate or even a mobile control centre wouldn't be an enormous engineering challenge with the more computerised systems.

[Sea Skimmer]

Good point about signalling centres, actually; that hadn't occurred to me. Though setting up an alternate or even a mobile control centre wouldn't be an enormous engineering challenge with the more computerised systems.

It wouldn’t be a big challenge except for security and cost. If the system works from mobile access points that means someone bent on a computer network invasion will have an easier time doing it. Then all your trains get crashed in the most optimal manner at the worst possible locations… this would suck. Use of radio for mobile operations of course also leaves the mobile unit open to direct detection unless you end up with a very expensive communications suit. The other option is the mobile unit travels between numerous prebuilt plug in sites, some air defenses do that too like Iraq in the late 1990s, but either way costs go up.

Also remember when each control center gets bombed the operators get killed; even computerized systems have them and the fewer the more important each guy is. You also suffer cumulative damage to the whole railroad infrastructure as attacks mount. Central traffic control demands thousands of individual track and switch sensors all over the place, and attacks on the railroads and lack of regular maintenance due to all the work spent repairing damage will quickly mean a worn down system that doesn’t work. It might mostly work, but you’ll start getting crashes. If any insurgents are around they can sabotage all those sensors real quickly with nothing more then rocks or hammers or wire cutters so you'll need personal on site as guards anyway. You might as well have a control tower too.

Certainly railroads can be kept moving under very heavy air attacks, but you need a lot of shear manpower to keep everything working, and trains that are short and make the trip in a series of short dashes along repaired stretches of track. Signaling basically doesn’t exist except for a crude block system. Only one train per length of track and hope for the best. Maintenance crews just jump out of the way of passing trains or else hope to stop them. Keeping truck routes open can eat up manpower too, but at least you can't be blocked by a single broken bit of rail.

The more distributed the railroad system, in all its respects, the more robust it should be against attack. At the one hand a system with narrow gauge trolley track running down every single road would be nearly as hard as roads to knock out. At the other end something like TGV track could be endlessly knocked out by mere near misses because of the very high precision required for such high speeds.

I saved a blurb from a book a while back on just what North Korea used to keep its railroad sort of operating in the Korean war. At one point the US anti rail strategy actually called for making but endless breaks in the track with fighter bombers since we couldn't find enough rail cars to blow up due to movements all being at night. Didn't work too well.

Railroad Recovery Bureau formed in 1950. Two Railroad repair and communications brigades formed each of 7,000 men in six battalions.
Bridge repair and construction battalion, heavy equipment and construction battalion, railroad repair battalion, engineer battalion, security battalion and communications battalion

Each brigade deployed in small groups at about 50 major stations and in 10 man crews positioned every 4 miles along the track

2 PLA Railway Corps divisions deployed with 3-4 regiments and supporting units each. By July 1953 40,000 Chinese railway workers deployed in North Korea

North Korean railroad Security Division formed from NKPA 38th Security Unit remnants. Total strength of 8,000 personal in Janaury 1953 with four infantry regiments and several independent units under division HQ.

Each regiment has HQ, three infantry battalions, submachine gun, signal, and anti aircraft machinegun companies, recon, guard and supply platoons, medical, personal and administration sections. Small arms but no organic artillery.

The security division existed because of persistent US and British commando raids on coastal railroad tunnels. Basically we are looking at close to 60,000 men used to keep a couple of roughly 200 mile long stretches of track operating. That’s against 1953 air power and the US only deployed limited air and naval air forces to Korea. Vietnam kept tracks operating for most of the war, but they had insane US bombing restrictions as an aid.

I’ve also found some stuff on US railroad operating units in WW2. Basically reach major railroad in the US formed a ‘Railroad Grand Division’ as a peacetime reserve force in the 1930s. In wartime this turned into a force in the range of 5,000-7,000 men, with 4-5 railroad operating divisions and 1-2 railroad shop divisions. The reason for the second railroad shop division was some Grand Divisions operated diesel and steam locomotives, some steam only. List of them can be found here
http://www.scribd.com/doc/34941642/Rail ... -Divisions

Basically they sent one of these Grand Divisions to each theater of the war, Persia, North Africa and Britain in the 1942-43 Period, then later a huge swarm appeared in India and France and most of the others moved up into France too. So the US may had had in the range In addition some railroad traffic control battalions existed controlling several Grand Divisions apiece, which operated the signaling gear for the areas in which it existed.

[The Dark]

Though off hand I don't know much about the current state of the Iraqi railway system, I know they had some major lines running between the major cities. IIRC, Afghanistan had hardly any functional railroads a few years back, but supposedly there has been a push to build new lines; not sure how that's going.

Afghanistan has no functional railways and 12,350 km of paved roads (plus 29.800 km of unpaved roads).

Iraq has 2,272 km of railways in 1.435 meter gauge. It has 37,851 km of paved roads and 7,049 km of unpaved roads.

As for their importance, railways are still critical for shifting supplies. Road transport is short-limbed unless very high incidental costs are accepted (and a lot of trucks are available; even then the distance that a truck lift can be effective is limited to around 800 km tops and in the upper quarter of that the number of trucks needed and their failure rate are terrifying.

To follow on a bit, Iraq's most common locomotives are Chinese-built Co-Co DF10FI 1840kW diesel locos, made by Delian Locomotive Works (about 10 years old). They also have some old JT22CW 12-645E3B from Thyssen-Henschel (those are almost 30 years old). There might be a couple Macosa J26CW/AC diesel-electrics or MLW MXS620s still operating, but the Delian and the Thyssen are the two primary types of locomotives operating in Iraq. The Thyssens are particularly well-liked, since three of them were used for Hussein's personal trains, and have extremely low mileage and had the best maintenance.

Contrary to popular belief, there are a few short railways operating on Afghanistan. For international rail, one travels from Termez, Uzbekistan to Kheryabad, Afghanistan, and the other is from Serhetabat, Turkmenistan to Towraghondi, Afghanistan. The average freight shipped on the Termez-Kheryabad line was 4,000 tons per month in 2009. There's also an Iranian line from Kashmar, Iran to Bafgh, Afghanistan, with work being done on a spur into iron mining country in Khorasan Province. In January of this year, work began on a rail line from Hairatan to Mazar-i-Sharif, which is scheduled to be completed next June. Proposals are being examined for extending the line to Herat (the border with Iran) and Shirkhan Bandar (the border with Tajikistan), to allow Tajik and Uzbek freight to be shipped overland to the Persian Gulf through Afghanistan and Iran.