Ireland’s Railways in the First World War, 1914-18

Machine guns, artillery, gas, tanks, battleships, U-boats, Zeppelins and aircraft are the major military-industrial technologies that have shaped the global understanding and memory of the First World War, yet their lethality depended without exception on railways. ‘The most powerful and decisive element of war’ was how Russia’s War Minister Kuropatkin described railway transport in a discussion of mobilisation planning in 1899. Indeed railways were central to the war’s outbreak. Taylor (1969) perhaps exaggerated the influence of their schedules on Europe’s politicians in the July crisis, but certainly railway transport allowed the generals to conceive the rapid mobilisation of mass armies, and it was the foundation of the Schlieffen Plan that gave Berlin the confidence to risk a first-strike two-front war. Thereafter the vast scale and duration of the trench stalemate would have been impossible without railways to move the enormous long-distance flows of men, equipment and supplies to the fronts and naval bases - horses and the early lorries were completely inadequate for that challenge. On the home fronts the big industrial cities were critically dependent on rail-borne food, fuel and raw materials. In short, railways were the arteries of Europe’s war efforts.

Yet the academic literature is minimal. The wartime railways of Germany, Austria (sic) and France featured in Yale UP’s Carnegie-sponsored project of the 1920s on the economic and social history of the war, with separate books for Britain (1921) and Russia (1939). But since the 1930s we have only a few articles and book chapters such as Stevenson (1999) on pre-war investment and van Creveld (1977) on the Schlieffen plan. There has not been a single academic monograph for any major European power, with the arguable exception of Senin’s recent (2010) book on the Russian railways during the longer period 1914-22. The popular literature is more extensive, but such works tend to focus on locomotives, armoured trains and military field railways rather than the fundamental questions of how, and how well, the national networks coped with the war emergency.

Given the centrality of railways to the war’s logistics, the academic and public understandings of the war must be considered seriously deficient until the histories of the wartime national railway systems have been subjected to rigorous academic scrutiny. The proposed project will complement work already under way at Aberdeen to address these issues for mainland Britain (Kenny) and Russia (Heywood). The railways of Ireland fully merit treatment as a discrete project in this regard. They were managed separately from the integrated railways of England, Scotland and Wales, and faced a variety of different and significant operating challenges, including fuel shortages and popular rebellion. Analysis of the management and operation of Ireland’s railways can potentially cast new light on the place of Ireland in the British war effort.

The project should provide an overarching analysis of six core inter-connected themes - political, administrative, economic, technical, cultural and social - both to address the basic question of how well the railways coped and to serve as a framework for future research. Case-studies of selected strategic routes (such as the Belfast–Dublin line) and fixed assets such as major workshops might be used to analyse the war’s impacts on traffic demands, operating performance and the work force. The assessments will be mainly qualitative, with statistics used where appropriate to identify basic trends. The project will be based on extensive research with contemporary sources which will be undertaken mainly in Aberdeen, Dublin (Library and Archive of the Irish Railway Record Society; National Archives of Ireland) and Belfast (Public Record Office of Northern Ireland). Aberdeen has excellent holdings in railway history and a close link with the library and archives of the National Railway Museum (York).