Armoured Train - Design and Equipment

Design and Equipment

The railroad cars on an armoured train were designed for many tasks. Typical roles included:

• Artillery - fielding a mixture of guns and machine guns
• Infantry - designed to carry infantry units, may also mount machine guns
• Machine gun - dedicated to machine guns
• Anti-aircraft - equipped with anti-aircraft guns
• Command - similar to infantry wagons, but designed to be a train command centre
• Anti-tank - equipped with anti-tank guns, usually in a tank gun turret
• Platform - unarmoured, used for any purpose from the transport of ammunition or vehicles, through track repair or derailing protection to railroad ploughs for track destruction.
• Troop sleepers
• The German Wehrmacht would sometimes put a Fremdgerät, such as a captured French Somua S-35 or Czech PzKpfw 38(t) light tank, or Panzer II light tank on a flatbed car which could be quickly offloaded by means of a ramp and used away from the range of the main railway line to chase down enemy partisans
• Missile transport - the USSR had railway-based RT-23 Molodets ICBMs by the late 1980s (to reduce the chances of a first strike succeeding in destroying the launchers for a retaliatory strike). The US at one time proposed having a railway-based system for the MX Missile program but this never got past the planning stage

Different types of armour were used to protect from attack by tanks. In addition to various metal plates, concrete and sandbags were used in some cases for improvised armoured trains.

Armoured trains were sometimes escorted by a kind of rail-tank called a draisine. One such example was the 'Littorina' armoured trolley which had a cab in the front and rear, each with a control set so it could be driven down the tracks in either direction. Littorina mounted two dual 7.92mm MG13 machine gun turrets from Panzer I light tanks.