Railroads
The first time railroads were used as a weapon of war was in the Crimean War. Before the Crimean War the Russians had less than 700 miles of rail roads throughout the country. After the war Russia embarked on an extensive rail building plan, having learned the lessons taught by the British Army and engineers. It was a lesson learned the hard way. During the war the main target of the British and their French and Ottoman allies was the capture of the Russian naval base on the Black Sea at Sevastopol. After several bloody battles including at Balaclava and Alma the attack on Sevastopol settled into a lengthy siege.
The British need to supply their guns and men on the plateau outside the city from their main base at Balaclava and there were no railroads in the area. So they built one. In three weeks. After receiving the necessary equipment the British built a railroad of about eight miles to provide supplies to the men besieging the city. These supplies included heavy siege guns and ammunition, food for men, fodder for horses, medical supplies, and replacements for wounded men who were evacuated by train. Meanwhile the Russians defending the city were forced to rely on a single supply road which ran north where it connected with main roads in Ukraine.
The Russian dependence on the supply road led to the Battle of Inkerman, which was a bloody stalemate, and the besieged Russians continued to have difficulties resupplying their troops in the embattled city. Ironically, the materials to build a supply railroad had been delivered to Sevastopol prior to the conflict but the Russian military leaders had taken no action to construct a military rail road because they didn’t know how. There were no engineers with the Russians who had any experience in laying track. In the early days of the war some of the iron rails were seized by the Russian Navy.
The Russians used the rails and other iron plate to cover the wooden sides of their ships to protect them from exploding shells. Soon British and French vessels followed suit. This led some to claim that the Crimean War was the first in which ironclad ships engaged in battle, but the ships were simply wooden sided ships covered with a temporary iron plate. The iron was too heavy for the ships to move with sails alone. Ships which were not equipped with steam engines needed to shed the protective iron in order to move. Reliable explosive shells could destroy any wooden ship with a single hit, which would click engulf the vessel with flames.
The rapid movement of troops in response to a fluid tactical situation, or to create one, was not a feature of the railroads during the Crimean War, largely because there weren’t any in most of the regions where the major fighting occurred. But it was the first time railroads were used to support troops in combat. After the war major efforts to expand Russia’s rail network were undertaken, so that by the beginning of the 1880s there were more than 14,000 miles of track in use in the Russian Empire. Sixty years later, when the Germans invaded Russia in Operation Barbarossa, there were more than 100,000 miles of track in Russia.