"Troops from the Somerset Light Infantry man an armoured train on the Romney, Hythe and Dymchurch miniature railway in Kent, 14 October 1940."

This railway has a 15" track gauge, although there are others in the U.K. with the same gauge. However, I believe this is the only one that had an armored train.



History of U.K. 15" gauge railways:
http://ngruk.blogspot.com/2013/02/15-minimum-gauge-railways-chronology.html

LOl...

Hardly 'stealth' with a little 'chuffin' engine...

Thanks for the pic, that thing is hilarious!

I think I'd feel safer in the tank "Driving Over" the train
Would be cool in my back yard though!
Imagine being called for that duty - "okay guys hop on lets go"!

Same train :







Here's the locomotive above without armor :



More about the Romney, Hythe and Dymchurch Railway :

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Romney,_Hythe_and_Dymchurch_Railway

H.P.

I knew things were bad for Britain in 1940 after we abandoned most of our equipment in France but I never knew things were this bad.

Seems like one of those 'brilliant' ideas Captain Mainwaring would have come up with

More views :







This armored train was credited with shooting down a Messerschmitt Bf 109, a Heinkel He 111 and a Dornier Do 17... (according to Wikipedia)

H.P.

Thomas Goes To War!

That's a truly beautiful locomotive without the armor!

How bizzare! I was just watching a video on Youtube the other day with 80s singer "Captain Sensible" (!!) doing a 6 minute documentary on taking that train to the Kentish coast. It was made in 2010, so the railway seems to still be working in good nick.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gycIcbNtYoA

I supose even old punks have hobbbies!

Paul

kinda' looks like HO scale rolling stock would be pretty close to 1/35 scale for a model of this thing. Explain that to the judges.....

Crazy .
I hope the gunners didn't all open up at the same time, and firing to the same side. The poor train may of tipped over
due to the recoil

Is there some sort of web site for these oddities of WW2?



Paul

Edit:

By the way, long live old school punks

Well, no WONDER the Germans called off Operation Sea Lion. Look at that train! Can you blame them?

Seriously, Sea Lion was thoroughly wargamed at Sandhurst in 1974. The results were quite clear. There was more to the Home Guard than Dad's Army would have you believe. It was a well-coordinated "defense in depth" structure and it would have worked, although I suspect casualties would have been high.
According to the Sandhurst study, the Home Guard would have slowed the German infantry and made life quite difficult for paratroops. And if overwhelmed, there was always another line, and another, and another...
Don't forget the Germans wouldn't have had a lot of heavy weapons with them at this point. And they didn't - and would never have - air superiority. Anyway, then the fleet arrives, destroys the second wave and cuts off all hope of resupply and support, while on land British and Commonwealth regular army and heavy weapons start to arrive.
And that would be that.

But take the Home Guard out of that equation, and the picture is not so clear...

- Marc

Besides, When home guard starts shooting, The Germans would be incapacitated by uncontrollable laughter at the sight of the 15" guage armored train.

I think the recoil from the anti-tank rifle shown in one of the pictures would be enough to tip the train over.

Talk about show-stoppers at your local hobby show!

Putting aside claims and war-games, THIS little thing would not have made much of an impact on hardly any campaign or invasion - any more than most other armed trains. But so what?! It IS COOL!

What is astounding and fun is that this contraption and crew apparently successfully downed some aircraft!

I'll bet that those dazed fly-boys swooped over, saw what they thought was a REAL train ("Wow! Hans! Look at THAT! What an opportunity! Let's go for it! Oh, and call Karl back at the hangers and tell that farmer to get extra paint out for marking up this one! OK: Flaps down, throttle back. Here we GO...!"), zoomed in... in...in a little closer ... only to belatedly discover that what had been thought a converted Royal Mail Express full of cargo and big guns turned out to be an armored (and armed) toy escaped from some summer kiddy-park or palace garden!

OK, Model Companies.. Come on! Make THIS! This one would certainly SELL!

Bob

Don't panic Don't panic
They don't like it up'em, you know.

If anyone does want to try modeling it, I just used an online scale converter and the 1:35 rail gauge would be 10.9 mm. N-scale track is 9 mm, and there is an esoteric narrow gauge railway modeling scale of 09 (O-9), which is used to represent ~18" gauge in O-scale - 1:43.5 in the U.K.

You can get an idea of the proportion of figures to equipment in 09 here:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TRRUSCH4jd8&list=PL31E3EFA3F1AF90E5&index=36
This well-done "pizza" layout represents an "estate railway", which the 15" lines were initially proposed / built for in England. (see earlier 15" link)

Another option is TT scale at 1:120, with 12 mm track gauge - not so well known in the west, but quite popular in the former Eastern Bloc and Russia.

Something generically known as Gn15 is widely used for 15" prototypes (and lots of fanciful stuff), with 1:20 - 1:24 figures and details on 16.5 mm track (HO/OO).

It's a bit of a double problem in that as a miniature railway, you want to try to get the rail gauge close to accurate, but at the same time you need to be able to fit 1:35 figures in the engine and wagons.

For a static diorama, perhaps the best option would be to build a new superstructure over a TT wagon chassis for the armored wagons. If you wanted to do the engine, look for a non-running TT-scale 4-8-2 (or close), as you only need a depiction of the running gear, with the armor covering almost everything else. Perhaps a German plane suspended overhead - or on the way down.

Make sure you bring photo documentation with you for the skeptical judges ;-)

I think some people are viewing this is a "toy" train, but narrow gauge railroads were quite common around the world, especially in the mineral and timber extraction industries. One of their advantages was the need for a smaller right-of-way (can handle more difficult terrain) and the overall lower level of capital investment required.

If this was a coastal railroad - perhaps in an area where roads are poor, indirect, or non-existent - it makes perfect sense that an armored train would be used in a likely invasion target. Or at least as much sense as any armored train does in an area of mobile warfare.

KL

Kurt - I think an important distinction here is that this was a miniature railroad, where the equipment was meant to look like that of a standard gauge railroad, but with the dimensions greatly reduced. I have not read the history of this line, but based on the effort spent on the engines, I'd have to think that the motivation behind it was less than 100% pragmatic. The guy who proposed, and first started to work with 15" gauge, called it "minimum gauge" - in the sense that he felt it was the smallest that allowed the railway to achieve any practical work - on his estate in this case.

Narrow gauge, OTOH, was always seen as a fully serious working railroad, but using a less than 56.5" track gauge. The reasons for this are many - including financial, temporal, and pragmatic - these railways allowed narrower gauge (not track), tighter radius, steeper grades, etc. The engines and wagons were designed specifically for the situation at hand, and didn't try to emulate standard gauge stock, although often had a similar appearance for engineering reasons.

The 60 cm / 2' railways of WW1 were initially planned to use the Decauville portable track system, which was originally designed for agricultural use. The lightweight track panels could be quickly laid and/or moved by unskilled workers, thus allowing the trains to go where they were needed at the moment.

Of course much "permanent" track was put down as the war progressed, but these railways served the important task of bringing supplies to the front - and taking away the wounded - in an environment where shellholes and other factors wouldn't allow road transport. Supplies were generally transloaded from standard gauge trains some 10 miles behind the front lines, and the final few hundred yards to the trenches were usually handled by small wagons pushed by manpower.

Charles

I must admit I never realised the railway (which I have been on) was originally built for pleasure, I had assumed there was either an industrial or military origin to the line itself; also in that area is the Royal Military Canal, and a military road, both built during the Napoleonic wars, along with the Martello Towers, all built due to proximity of the area to the continent. Today of course is the nuclear power station, built there so that if there's an accident, the prevailing wind will carry the fallout over France, Belgium, Holland and Germany...

"Wot" do you mean Paul?

Couldn't find that anywhere, and I really doubt that anything like that would have been possible. Sounds like video game realism to me...

Wikipedia article

Looks like the information comes from G.Balfour's book " The armoured train: its development and usage" (Batsford. ISBN 0-7134-2547-4.)


British Pathé footage (1944) :

http://www.britishpathe.com/video/toy-train-goes-to-war

More informations about the armored train in this thread


H.P.

This tiny railroad ran along a remote section of channel coastline not accessible by any other means. It was not intended as any sort of joke but rather a wartime expedient to build this armored train to patrol an area it already ran in anyway.