Southern Rail System

[Straight Arrow]

My first campaign game as the South is now in late 62. As it has always been an area of interest for me, I have been paying close attention to how the game handles Southern industrialization.

I think Civil War 2 has done an excellent job in capturing the difficulties the South had in using and maintaining their rail network.

What sort of difficulties?

To start with, the southern rail system was largely designed to connect cotton growing areas to sea ports and was not linked together in a logical pattern.

Furthermore, many of the rail companies used different gauges and trains had to be unloaded and reloaded when switching company roads.

At the start of the war, the only Southern iron works that could make locomotives was in Tennessee. It quickly fell to the North. The Tredegar works in Virginia had closed their locomotive shop a few years before the war and switched their rail machinery to other purposes.

The South did an incredible job of industrialization, but their Achilles heel was the rail net work. A limited system to began with, it was poorly managed, over worked, and quickly wore out. The transportation failure lead to food shortages in an agricultural paradise; the armies starved in the middle of plenty. In addition, raw materials could not be shipped to manufacturing centers. Proof of this is, during the war, the Tredegar Iron Works never ran at more then %70 capacity. The rich supply of Alabama and Tennessee iron never made it to Richmond.

If your interested in digging deeper into the topic of Southern war industry try reading:

Ploughshares into Swords: Frank E Vandiver - an excellent book on Josiah Gorgas and Confederate Ordnance.

Confederate Industry: Harold S Wilson - dry but informative on the textile industry.

Ironmakers to the Confederacy: Joseph R Anderson - history of the the Tredegar works.


To sum it up, I believe the game designers did an excellent job of capturing the crappy Southern rail system.

[khbynum]

Hi, Straight Arrow, welcome to the forum. You would have been better off posting this in the historical section, since it doesn't relate specifically to game play. People here like to talk about history, but seem to prefer to separate that discussion from the game. At least, that's what I've been told. Thanks for the references, I'll check them out. You might also like Moore, Jerrold N., 1996. Confederate Commissary General. White Mane Publ. Co.

Overall, I agree with you, though I have some ideas how the Southern rail system could be handled better. We do get the Selma to Montgomery link, which didn't exist historically (Braxton Bragg would have loved it). How much ironclad armor would that cost?

[Gray Fox]

Some members of this forum who want the game to follow a more historical path might be interested to know what the actual history was.

The CSA possessed the third largest rail network in the world, behind the Union and the U.K., but ahead of France and Germany. Also, much of the Union rail net was not involved in the war. Early in the war, Bragg moved 30,000 troops 754 miles in 14 days by rail.

The rail network in the Union also did not share one common gauge as lines were owned by commercial companies that were in competition. However, in the 1870's it was decided to change all the rails in the South to one gauge. After a certain amount of planning, the actual "Get 'R done" part took exactly three whole days.

At the time, each locomotive was made to order, thus if one broke down, you couldn't cannibalize parts from it to fix other inop engines. So the amount of working infrastructure in the CSA decreased over time as resources were not devoted to replacement engines.

A Government Department to run the train assets in the Union was created. A Federal law was passed that allowed this Department to seize any commercial train for war use. The Union paid top dollar to use commercial trains. So, a commercial train company could make money and move what the Government wanted, or the trains would just be seized and the Union would run them.

The CSA did not follow this example. The South paid a less competitive rate to commercial train companies and they could take it or leave it. So cotton would be moved to blockade runners while war supplies sat in warehouses.

[tripax]

One other interesting point to remember, Union Armies changed the gauge of tracks in some regions they marched through to allow northern trains to travel through. My understanding is that the hard parts of laying new track involve things like bridges, tresses, tunnels, embankments, etc. Once a flat path-ish (with banked turns or whatever) is laid out, laying ties and rails isn't too hard I guess. I think that is why rebuilding destroyed rails could be done so quickly in many cases.