Railway gun
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
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- See also Railgun a weapons that propel projectiles using an electromagnetic field.
A railway gun, also called railroad gun or railgun is a large artillery piece, designed to be placed on rail tracks. Many countries have built railway guns, but the best known are the large Krupp-built pieces used by Germany in World War I and World War II. Some of these were so large that they required two parallel sets of tracks to support the gun.
Railway guns (like their seagoing analogues, battleships) have been rendered obsolete by advances in technology. Their large size and limited mobility make them vulnerable to attack, and similar payloads can be delivered by aircraft, rocket, or missile.
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[edit] History
The idea of railway guns appears to have been first suggested in the 1850s by a Mr Anderson, who published a pamphlet in the United Kingdom titled National Defence in which he proposed a plan of ironclad railway carriages. A Russian, Lebedew, claims to have first invented the idea in 1860 when he is reported to have mounted a mortar on a railway car. The first railway guns used in combat were constructed and used during the American Civil War, when guns and mortars were mounted on flatcars and during the Siege of Petersburg. France also used improvised railways guns during the Siege of Paris in 1870 and the United Kingdom mounted a few six inch guns on railway cars during the First Boer War intending to bombard forts around Pretoria, but Pretoria was captured before they could be deployed.
In France, Lt. Col Peigné is often credited with designing the first railway gun in 1883. Commandant Mougin is credited with putting guns on railcars in 1870.
The French arms maker, Schneider offered a number of models in the late 1880s and produced a 120 mm gun intended for coastal defense, selling some to the Danish government in the 1890s. They also sold a 20 cm model to Peru in 1910.
The outbreak of the First World War caught the French with a shortage of heavy field artillery. In compensation, large numbers of large static coastal defense guns and naval guns were moved to the front, but these were typically unsuitable for field use and required some kind of mounting. The railway gun provided the obvious solution. By 1916, both sides were deploying railway guns. The most famous railway gun of the war is probably the Paris Gun.
The Second World War saw the final use of the railway gun, with the massive Schwerer Gustav 800 mm gun, the largest artillery gun to be fired in anger, deployed by Germany. The rise of the aeroplane effectively ended the usefulness of the railway gun. Like the battleship, they were massive, expensive, and easily destroyed from the air.
[edit] See also
[edit] In fiction
- The Yoko Tsuno-series graphic novel Le Canon de Kra (in French) features a large railway gun deployed on the Isthmus of Kra
- In the alternate history novel Worldwar: In the Balance, a lucky hit by a railway gun destroys a crucial alien ship containing most of the invader's nuclear warheads.
[edit] External links
- "When Artillery First "Took to the Rails"
- "Railwaygun Web Museum". Retrieved April 21, 2005.
- K5 Eisenbahn geschutze
[edit] References
- Hogg, Ian V. (2005). Allied Artillery of World War One. Crowood Press. ISBN 1-86126-712-6.
- Jäger, Herbert (2001). German Artillery of World War One. Crowood Press. ISBN 1-86126-403-8.
