Landships II

Considering the era and the apparent strength of that bridge, it would probably be a railway bridge TC and the RE were also involved in operating the railways during the war. So, quite possibly this pile-driver is part of the official RE equipment though in wartime the boundaries get blurred. The corps grew enormously and very quickly during wartime in terms of both manpower and equipment.

Improvised and jury-rigged pile drivers were certainly used for the relatively light wooden bridges on roadways (prefabricated steel truss bridging was yet to be invented) but all the heavy transportation was by rail and railway bridges need proper piles and proper pile drivers. Somewhere there will be figures on the scale of construction in wartime and it will be staggering in comparison with pre-war progress. Even the late-coming US Army Corps of Engineers brought 1.5 million tons of railway construction equipment, locomotives and rolling stock with them when they came to France, laid 937 miles of standard-gauge track and built a 2,190 foot bridge over the Loire River, according to this source - http://en.allexperts.com/q/Military-History-669/2011/10/ww1-4.htm. Not bad for the 15 months or so they were operating in strength. The RE were there much longer.

Heh, here's the very nomograph the Captain who did the preliminary design might have used:

From MILITARY ENGINEERING. (PART IIIA.)
MILITARY BRIDGING-GENERAL PRINCIPLES AND MATERIALS.
GENERAL STAFF, WAR OFFICE, 1913. (Reprinted 1915.)
Price One Shilling.

Great sleuthing TC! Chris Baker's page here - http://www.1914-1918.net/re_rlwy_cos.htm details the build-up of the RE Railway Companies in WW1 and gives some impression of the sophistication, as well as the scale, of the wartime effort. There was an even greater infrastructure supporting the whole venture of course, including the military Forestry Companies (again, part of the RE I should think, also CFC, NFC - the Canadians and Newfoundlanders each had Forestry Corps' separate from their Engineers Corps', AE/RAE, perhaps NZE/RNZE as well, all operating in Britain and France as well as "at home", not sure about WW1 for the New Zealanders but certainly during WW2) and the RE would have handled most of the transportation to the theatre of operations of their materials and equipment as well.

Not as spectacular as the armour, artillery and infantry but just as hard to comprehend across all the years, the sheer scale, complexity, co-ordination and (inescapably) waste - though some part of that wartime construction served the following peacetimes as well.

-- Edited by Rectalgia on Sunday 22nd of April 2012 02:56:34 AM

It's an area that I've never thought about, the logistics of getting all the men & materials to the battle.