Comments by "Neil of Longbeck" (@neiloflongbeck5705) on "Why Soviet Logistics weren’t as nightmarish as German Logistics in WW2" video.

  1. I see you know a little about railways. The Russian gauge in WW2 was only 89mm wider than the German gauge. If modern track is to go by with a sleeper length of 2,560mm the rails would on standard gauge track would have the inner edge of the rail about 532mm in from the ene of the sleeper, for Russian gauge it would be 488mm in from the end. However, the length of sleeper is a pure guess, as there is nothing I can find on the internet to say just how long the sleepers were on the railways of the Soviet Union. In the UK prior to WW1 the standard length of a sleeper had standardised on most railways to 2,745mm and afterwards, as a cost saving measure, to 2,592mm. The decrease in inset distance on the assumed sleeper length is not that significant as timber sleepers are often cut shorter than normal to around fixed obstructions, and all without train falling over at those points. The Germans whilst retreating from Russia also used railway ploughs which ripped the sleepers in half and damaged the track bed, so the Soviets would have had to restore the track bed in order to lay down new tracks, with new sleepers. Damage to the track bed is a more likely source of derailments. A lot of effort is taken in peacetime to ensure that railways are kept as level as possible as passengers don't like being thrown around. But it's not just for our convenience, trains don't like it either. A typical steam locomotive has a very limited amount of play in its suspension, unlike a car, lorry or dare I say it a tank, most of the suspension of the train actually comes from its trackbed being flexible to absorb the weight if the train whilst being rigid enough to not collapse. Quickly repaired or badly maintained track may be more like a rollercoaster than a a railway and that means either limiting speed of trains or derailments. As for the train loading policies of both the Soviet and German armies, there us something to be said for mixed loads. At least you'll get some of what you need on each train that arrives at the rail head, provided the correct items were dispatched. In the way of these things if you put the loads on trains in the most effective manner, the train that is lost to enemy action will be the one filled with the most vital supplies.
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  2.  @TheImperatorKnight  but you're relying too much on an economic historian and not an engineer. I spoke to a railway civil engineer. Yes, the holes left by the bolts of spikes would reduce the strength of the sleeper, but not that much considering the nature of the material; some sleepers would have broken, but for reasons other than the shifted rail. It is also true that moving a rail outwards will increase the bending moment on the sleeper, again but not by much. The real problem is the increased loadings on the track bed at the outer end of the sleeper at the end with the shifted rail. This increase load on the ballast making the track bed shift exacerbating the problem of the shifted rail.
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