Armoured train
장갑열차
An armed train of armour-plated wagons carrying artillery and machine guns, coupled to a locomotive. From the mid-nineteenth to the mid-twentieth century it served to move firepower quickly along the railways, and it was helpless once the track was cut. Its most intensive use came in the Russian Civil War, where the Red Army, the Whites and the Czechoslovak Legion all fought for the railway lines with armoured trains in the lead.
In depth
Armed trains had already been used in the American Civil War, the Franco-Prussian War and the Boer Wars. On 15 November 1899 in South Africa a British armoured train carrying the war correspondent Winston Churchill was ambushed and derailed by the Boers, and Churchill was taken prisoner. He later recalled that nothing looks more formidable than an armoured train, yet nothing is more helpless once a single bridge or culvert is blown. Russia used both light and heavy armoured trains in the Russo-Japanese War and the First World War. In the Russian Civil War they multiplied because there were no clear front lines and the railways were almost the only way to move troops, ammunition and grain. Until 1919 "surrogate" trains, improvised in a day from passenger and goods wagons with sandbags and steel plate, were common, alongside proper trains built with naval guns by naval engineers at the Putilov and Izhora works. Their crews were often sailors, who ran life and duty on board like a warship.
The Revolutionary Military Council of the Republic set an establishment of 136 crew, one armoured engine and two armoured wagons by an order of 18 December 1918, put the trains under each army's chief of armoured units on 4 January 1919, and on 5 August 1920 issued instructions dividing them into assault type "A" and fire-support types "B" and "V". According to the Russian sources the Red Army had 103 armoured trains and light armoured trains on 1 October 1920, and by the end of the civil war the Central Council of Armoured Units (Tsentrobron) had 122 full armoured trains. The Whites used up to 79 at various times, and the Czechoslovak Legion's Orlík and the trains of the Ukrainian People's Republic are also remembered. In My Life Trotsky wrote that his headquarters train "in many of its features stood closer to an armoured train than to a headquarters on wheels", and that part of its crew went to "the model armoured train named after Lenin". After the civil war armoured trains served in the Estonian, Polish and Lithuanian wars of independence, in the Chinese warlord wars and with the Polish, Soviet and German armies in the Second World War, and Russia ran improvised armoured trains in the Chechen war and in its 2022 invasion of Ukraine.