Scotland’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 as a whole (Kenny) and for Russia (Heywood). The railways of Scotland fully merit treatment as a discrete system and project in this regard. Whereas the Anglo-Welsh border made no difference whatsoever to the railway companies in that area, the Anglo-Scottish border was distinct, with the Scottish lines controlled exclusively by Scottish companies. The territory was large with crucial industries, military bases and strategically vital routes such as the Kyle of Lochalsh line. Kenny’s current project addresses the UK network as a whole, and it cannot do justice to the complexity of the Scottish scene.

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 might be used to analyse the performance and impacts on selected strategic routes (such as the Kyle line) and fixed assets such as major workshops. 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 at Aberdeen and the National Archives of Scotland (Edinburgh). Aberdeen has excellent holdings in railway history and enjoys close links with the National Railway Museum and Museum of Scottish Railways.