Supplies and marches.

[Kaiser Kirk]

"Handbook on German Military Forces"
Planning tidbits

Trains

Double track standard gauge railroads have a daily capacity of 30 military trains in each direction.
Single track falls to 10 per day.

Basic troop trains can be up to 55 cars. An I-train could carry 350 officers & men, 10 light vehicles, 10 heavy vehicles and 70 horses. Alternately- and more pertinent here for WWI infantry- roughly 800 men.

As such a double tracked railroad could be presumed to be able to move up to ½ corps/day in each direction.

Trains take between 2-12 hours to load, and half that to unload, depending on complexity and amount of simultaneous loading/unloading operations.

Trains move 150-200 miles per day, falling to 60 near combat zones.

Road marches
Infantry marches at 3mph for long marches
Infantry marches at 4mph for short marches
Mounted units move at 6mph.

Infantry can march 20miles/day, 10 in adverse conditions. 10-15 near combat zones.
Motorized between 90 and 150 miles/day. 30 near combat zones.

Supplies
Heavy fighting runs 25-50lbs of material per man per day.
Other operations range from 5- 25lbs/day.

This means a Corps can require from 250,000lbs – 2,500,000lbs/day.

Supply trains can haul 990,000lbs on standard gauge safely, more with risk.
A large animal drawn supply column holds 66,000lbs
A mountain animal drawn column holds 22,000lbs
A pack train only 11,000lbs

[ctwaterman]

Excellent rules of thumb and this can give you a rough idea of how long it would take to build up the logistics say 100 miles from a rail head using horse drawn supply for say even something as small as a 2 Corps Attack.

Charles

[miketr]

The rule of thumb for an horse / mule supply train is 100 - 150 miles, after that they eat their loads and you would need to create depots, build up there and then resume the advance.

WW2 in Soviet Union was a dramatic example of the limits of what was basically an animal supplies army.  The Germans pushed way past their logistics reach in 1941.

Michael

[Borys]

Ahoj!
Great stuff!
Anything on narrow gauge RR in your sources?
Borys

[Nobody]

While I don't want to question your source, I suspect they these "Planning tidbits" included quite a lot reserves.

Trains

Double track standard gauge railroads have a daily capacity of 30 military trains in each direction.
Single track falls to 10 per day.

These values appear to me as especially low and I assume they are more limited by the infrastructure than the rails. Otherwise I see no reason why there shouldn't be driving several trains per track & direction per hour.

Basic troop trains can be up to 55 cars. An I-train could carry 350 officers & men, 10 light vehicles, 10 heavy vehicles and 70 horses. Alternately- and more pertinent here for WWI infantry- roughly 800 men.
Supply trains can haul 990,000lbs on standard gauge safely, more with risk.

55 cars are quite a lot. Although by this time (before ~1950?) those were small 2-axle closed good wagons.

Now, a 110 axle train weighs 1650 tons! (assuming a axle load of 15 tons, which I know was standard for military trains in WW2 and not really any lower during the first WW)
Assuming only half of that is usable for cargo, that would still be over 800 tons (more than 1 760 000 lbs), however, I imagine such a rather long an heavy train could only be hauled in a flat region. So 500 tons appear to be a reasonable value for a mountain train.



I just found an interesting page which supports many of the things you wrote: http://www.lexikon-der-wehrmacht.de/Soldat/Versorgung-R.htm
It also supports my calculations, that a freight train should be able to transport around 800 tons, because is does - gross weight. The 500 tons you mentioned is the net weight without crates and boxes necessary to transport the stuff.

P.S.:
Did you know that the German army fired 18.177.511.000 rounds of rifle (8x57 IS) and 2.112.001.000 shots of pistol (9 mm Para) ammunition? Given the 250000 to 350000 rifle rounds per goods wagon means that 60592 rail cars would be needed to transport them. A train roughly 550 km (341 miles) long!

[Borys]

Ahoj!
Polish rail infrastructure is built to service 60 car trains.
Borys

[miketr]

The Germans in WW1 really ran down their rail net and was a key factor in its collapse winter 1917/18.  Because they were running trains so hard they missed a lot of key maintenance, etc so between 1917 and 1918 they lost about 1/4 of their locomotive pool to wear and tear.

Michael

[Nobody]

The Germans in WW1 really ran down their rail net and was a key factor in its collapse winter 1917/18.  Because they were running trains so hard they missed a lot of key maintenance, etc so between 1917 and 1918 they lost about 1/4 of their locomotive pool to wear and tear.

Michael

Well I don't know about that, but it sounds true.
However I do know(at least I heard once a long time ago) that that was, most of the time, because they couldn't and not because they didn't "want" to. The reason they couldn't was because they had too many different types of locomotives. And these locomotives were coming from different Länderbahnen (state railways), which meant they were build to different norms and measuring systems.
So if you needed a 1 inch screw, you first had to make sure you were actually talking about the same inch, before other details like pitch, thread etc. In the end workshops just couldn't keep track of that.

[Kaiser Kirk]

The source material comes from the US War Dept's 1944 "Handbook on German Military Forces".
So I don't know what sort of reserves are built into the estimates, but when dealing with larger numbers such as a Division or Corps, I suspect these represent good averages as it was supposed to be a realistic assessment of what the Germans were doing.

So I don't know *why* they thought 30 trains on a double track and 10 on a single were max for the day, but it gave me a baseline.

Matters like the mobilized 4th Cavalry from Minsk need to load (1/2 day), move down towards Warsaw (1day), unload (1/2 day), transport all gear over the blown crossing..or go find a ford and move it there (1 day), load (1/2 day), move to Warsaw, move to Czechotowa (2 days) and unload (1/2) day... so 6 days per half corps, 12 days total without slop, with the sabotage of the railnet making a large difference in the Ukraines operational flexibility.

Now, they do mention that oversized trains are sometimes seen, where the Germans are pushing thier infrastructure too far. The 60-train load is interesting, and I may work it in, but I think I'll mainly use it for 'slop'. In this case, I'm counting trains for the 4th Cav's manpower..actually I think I forgot to figure the horses..argh.

[miketr]

The Germans in WW1 really ran down their rail net and was a key factor in its collapse winter 1917/18.  Because they were running trains so hard they missed a lot of key maintenance, etc so between 1917 and 1918 they lost about 1/4 of their locomotive pool to wear and tear.

Michael

Well I don't know about that, but it sounds true.
However I do know(at least I heard once a long time ago) that that was, most of the time, because they couldn't and not because they didn't "want" to. The reason they couldn't was because they had too many different types of locomotives. And these locomotives were coming from different Länderbahnen (state railways), which meant they were build to different norms and measuring systems.
So if you needed a 1 inch screw, you first had to make sure you were actually talking about the same inch, before other details like pitch, thread etc. In the end workshops just couldn't keep track of that.

The problem was multilevel.

1) Hard Freezes prevented the canal system from being used, it normally handled 15% of the load but dropped to 7% during winter of 1917-18.

2) The General Staff Kept 10% of engines and rolling stock in reserve to meet emergencies on the Front.

3) Loss of manpower as wages on the rail systems were frozen or at least couldn't keep up with war factor wages.  So people kept jumping ship for new jobs, Germany had a nasty inflation problem by 1917, 200% of pre-war if not higher.

4) The killer was the Railway authorities never told anyone that the wheels were about to come off the system so it wasn't till things imploded that anything was really done to try to fix the mess.

5) This is just a theory on my part but the Germans took over all the occupied Russian railroads, plus the captured engines and rolling stock.  I suspect that the state railways and not the army put up the manpower to try to run that.

Michael

[Darman]

59 trains were needed to carry a British infantry division in WW1.  ¹

And on an Italian/French connecting railway the total amount that could be handled was 20 trains a day.  ²
On this railroad the maximum size of the train was 32 wagons, with a gross load of 545 tons, which means a cargo load of 260 tons per train. ³


Footnotes:
¹  Search "fifty-nine" at Jonathan Farmer's Masters Dissertation
²  Ibid.  Search "Mont Cenis"
³  Ibid.  Search "tons per train"

[Nobody]

5) This is just a theory on my part but the Germans took over all the occupied Russian railroads, plus the captured engines and rolling stock.  I suspect that the state railways and not the army put up the manpower to try to run that.

At least in WW2 they couldn't, since Russia has a different gauge!. Also in WW2 the army "renailed" the track, but after that the state railway had take care of rolling stock and personal.

oh and I think you forgot
6) young men were drafted, so they simply had not enough personal.

[Borys]

Ahoj!
Regauging is not rocket science - pull out the stakes - move rail - hammer stakes back in. Back braking work, but RR troops - which every army had - did the job quickly.

IIRC - the regulation load is 40 men or 8 horses per car.

Borys

[miketr]

5) This is just a theory on my part but the Germans took over all the occupied Russian railroads, plus the captured engines and rolling stock.  I suspect that the state railways and not the army put up the manpower to try to run that.

At least in WW2 they couldn't, since Russia has a different gauge!. Also in WW2 the army "renailed" the track, but after that the state railway had take care of rolling stock and personal.

oh and I think you forgot
6) young men were drafted, so they simply had not enough personal.

It was different gauge in WW1 also.  The difference was when Lenin did his refuse to fight bit the Germans just advanced deeply into Russia capturing huge amounts of rolling stock and engines. They manned this themselves.  Before that as Borys pointed out they relayed the tracks.

Most of the manpower that they drafted ended up in Army Railway battalions I would expect.  They expanded so hugely during the war I doubt they came from any other source but yes manpower was a key problem.

Michael