WW2 Landing Craft on trains

:o)

-- Nick

Hi Ricardo

You miss a day or two on this group and when you next look in there has been signifcant thread on WWII railways.

As others have posted only the small assault caft cound be rail transported in the UK. The Southern Railway built a number at Easleigh and tested them at Southampton. Bullied, when informed tha boats were built from the keal upwards promptly decided the Southern would build them the other way round.

There is some good video footage of a finished craft being moved out of the works by rail. the clearance to the door opening is clerly but a few inches. contact me off list if you are interested and I will find which of the several SR WWII videos it is on.

Other small vessels were moved by rail including whalers (rowing boats) and small launches. Again I can provide references to pictures.

In America the need for the vast numbers of landing craft resulted in many inland fabrication plants building some of the larger types in kit form and then transporting the bits to the coast. There is an excellent sequence of video in colour of one such train.

Regards

Tony Cane Secretary World War Two Railway Study Group

Southampton and D-Day,[*] p8 has a photograph of a train of LCSMs ( eg LCSM 50 ) at 101 Berth on bogie low-loaders. Photograph is captioned "Landing Craft built at Southern Railway Works Eastleigh arriving at the New Docks 12th May 1943" and is credited to the ABP Collection of ex-Southern Railway photographs now held by Southampton City Heritage.

There are other photographs of an LCM arriving at the docks from Eastleigh on a Pickfords outsize load road trailer and numerous other photographs of landing craft in and around Southampton during 1943/4.

• Southampton and D-Day, Oral History, Southampton City Council, 1994, ISBN 1 872649 04 1

Philip Morten

The Maus was transported on a special flat-car - picture here of a model