War of 1918 and railways today

We are looking forward to seeing friends old and new at the Garden Railway Show in Peterborough on April 7^th.

Thank you to all our loyal customers who have bought our rolling stock kits over the years. It has been hard to find a good white-metal caster to replace Adrian Swain, but we are delighted to have found one here in Scotland. Even better, our price rises will be very modest. Some prices we can even hold at present levels.  The work is of the quality which you have the right to expect.

Buy now, while the kits are available!

Kits for WD bogies can be made up into a variety of WD wagons – D, E and F-class open wagons, H-class tanker wagons, covered freight wagons and ambulances. Swift Sixteen supply lovely wagon bodies.

We shall bring some Péchot kits. There will be a few of the historic platform wagons, first designed for the French Army in the 1880s, used through the First World War and only now being sold off to preserved railways in France and the UK.

16mm scale Péchot platform wagon made from a Wrightscale kit

We shall also offer the ever-popular mobile crane kit. Being a thoughtful officer, Péchot was aware of the dangers of handling vast high-explosive shells. This crane was one of many designs which aimed to make handling these deadly weights less arduous. Versions of this and the larger version of crane came across the Channel to be used on 2’ gauge prototypes.

16mm model of a Péchot system rail-mounted crane. The strange arrangement on the left is an ingenious counterweight making shellhandling easier

We hope also to have some kits for Mackenzie Holland signal kits. Watch this space!

We will have examples of the Wren 0-4-0 locomotive, the Quarry Hunslet 0-4-0, two forms of the Bagnall Excelsior, the 0-4-2 Tattoo and Baldwin Gas Mechanical locomotive on display. Pictures of our locomotives, and kits, can be found on the website of the show. Please see https://www.nationalgardenrailwayshow.org.uk/exhibitor/wrightscale/

We have been following the events of one hundred years ago. In the last blog, we left the brave Aussies hanging on with their fingernails against the storm-troopers of a furious Germans onslaught.  To recapitulate, this is what had just happened.

Drawing by J. Simont of British gunners March 1918. The artist shows them wearing gas masks. It is not certain that the Germans used tear gas in a space that was just about to be occupied by their own troops, but there was indeed a lot of smoke created by the artillery of both sides. From 'Illustration' magazine

The scene is the department of Somme. North of the river Somme, around the town of Albert were the British 3^rd Army. South of the Somme was the 5^th Army, south again of them were the French.

When waves of German attackers broke over the British 3^rd and 5^th armies on 21^st March 1918, the British were driven back by the speed, weight and fury of the attack. At four am a terrific bombardment started over 90 kilometres/55 miles of front. It stopped at ten past nine. In the time, more than 650,000 shells had been fired.

Normally, a bombardment would go on considerably longer. On this occasion, by the time that the smoke began to clear, the Germans were well on their way across No Man’s Land. They came in their thousands. Against 14 British divisions, there were 47 German ones.

On the south side, the ten divisions of the 5^th Army suffered terrible losses both of casualties and of terrain – up to 12 km/nearly 8 miles in one single day. The four divisions of the 3^rd fared better but also had to retreat to keep a united front.

By March 23^rd, the Germans had achieved their first target. They were poised to seize  communications with Paris.

Makeshift battalion command post at Plessi-le-Roi March 30th. The French were on the hill, the Germans in the chateau grounds below. Illustration magazine

Pétain ordered French support and the French 1^st Army started plugging gaps. The British 3^rd and 18^th Army corps joined with the French. What remained of the 5^th were already under French control.

By 26^th March, the Germans turned their main force on a secondary target, Amiens, sited on the Somme river, and the departmental capital. It controlled communications with northern France, the Channel and Britain. By April 4^th the Germans were within 16 km (10 miles) of the city.

It is argued that if the tide were not turned here, it would soon have been. German élan was nearly spent. They had advanced, fighting all the time, an average of 20km and in some cases much further. Their only supplies were what they had captured from an enemy obsessed about destroying what they could not carry – no water, no ammunition, no transport was to be left available.

It has been said that the Allies were saved by the state of the Somme battle-field. As every tree and building had been destroyed in 1916 and every river-bed was a churned up morass, the bleak landscape offered no shelter and no clean water.

The defenders at Villers-Bretonneux, just east of Amiens, were not to know this. With tremendous courage, they dug in and denied passage to the invaders. All went quiet. On 9^th April, the attack began in a new direction, well to the north of the Somme, this time the area around the river Lys. The pressure on the vital city of Amiens had lifted.

In March/April 1918, 189 steam locomotives were deliberately wrecked. The Baldwin 4-6-0, seen here as a 16mm Wrightscale model was a staple of British frontline transport and many were destroyed.

As the Allies retreated, they tried to keep valuable equipment from enemy use. Both sides knew that a complete 60cm gauge railway system would be as useful to the enemy as it was to their own. Where possible, trains rolled themselves and valuable supplies safely to the rear.

Where there were gaps, freight had to be trans-shipped on to metre gauge or standard, all needing man-power. That said, great things were done, especially north of the Somme. In the British 5^th Army sector, there had been no time to organise a proper trench railway system. They tried to evacuate some locomotives and wagons, but the network was neither wide nor deep enough. What could not be saved was deliberately wrecked.

Many examples of the D-Class wagon were used behind the British Front. Another important wagon was the H-Class which carried water. 1800 wagons had to be burned as the British retreated. 16mm model using Wrightscale bogies

In the the official history – Transportation on the Western Front – Henniker admits that between 21^st March and early April ‘nearly 300 locomotives and tractors were disabled by the removal of essential parts (injectors and magnetos) and nearly 2000 wagons burned. Over the six weeks to the end of April, destruction of 60cm gauge material continued. 189 locomotives and 138 locotractors were destroyed. The trench railway systems serving the Front had suffered equally. In early March 1918, the mileage operated was 920/1472 km. By the end of April, this had dropped to under 360 miles/576km.

If the German advance had been halted, it was a close-run thing .

Our policy on Data Protection and your Privacy    

Those of you who have put their names on lists of interest may be wondering about changes to the law on Data Protection. As you know, changes come into effect on May 25^th. We have considered the implications of these changes, and how the information we hold might affect your privacy.

We currently store our email address book online. It simply has name and email, no other personal details. All of you who email and expect a reply go into this email address book automatically. Every couple of months, I try to remove the ‘once onlies’  Everyone who emails us has the right to have their address removed immediately. We shall remind every first contact of this right. This is our only online data-base.

Our interest list is held off-line. In it, we try to include date of contact, a full name, postal address and phone number as well as email. This is because email addresses keep changing and we need an alternative way of keeping in touch. We, for example, have been obliged by our providers to change our own email address at least three times. We do not keep other personal details such as partner’s name, date of birth etc.

We do not hold any bank details online. Our policy is cash or cheque if at all possible. Where a customer requires the use of bank transfer, we shall discuss he situation beforehand. Privacy during the transaction will be ensured by the systems of the banks involved. Our bank is the Clydesdale. Their privacy policy is stated at

cbonline.co.uk/gdpr  

If you wish any email correspondence deleted after a payment, please inform us. We do not hold details online. We do not use internet banking.

Before May 25th, our Webmaster will put our privacy policy on the Wrightscale website.