One hundred and nine years ago, years before the first road tank transporters were developed, tanks either moved under their own power or via the vast 90-year-old rail network.
For the first crews and Mark I heavy tanks detraining at Wool station in late November 1916, the journey to their new home was far from over.
Exiting the station to the north, the tanks, with their sponsons already pushed in, would then need to make the laborious two-and half-mile journey over Woolbridge and the existing undulating road to Bovington Camp. Given their slow speed and mechanical unreliability, this short but bumpy route could take over an hour to complete and the arrival of the Mark IV tanks in 1917 did little to change this laborious journey.
Only the introduction of the single driver tanks; Mark V and Medium A Whippet, in the early summer of 1918, would offer crews travelling to and from Wool, more speed and reliability, although good driving skills and concentration were still essential if the tank was not to suffer a misfortune, an increasing problem given the development of wider tanks.
To ease this wear and tear, and to prevent further damage to the bridge stonework on Woolbridge, a decision was taken to build a single railway line from Wool to Bovington Camp.
Featuring a separate bridge span to cross the River Frome, the line opened on the 9 August 1919, having been built by German POWs, based in a large camp of wooden huts just to the west of Dorchester. Mainly employed in agricultural work and other labour activities, the men started being repatriated back to Germany by the summer of 1919 after labouring on the completion of the the railway.
Construction wise, with relatively few trees to deal with, the sand and gravel terrain of Bovington Heath posed little real technical difficulty, and the track; consisting of wooden sleepers, steel rails and ballast, was brought up from Wool by locomotive.
Additional engineering works involving the construction of the rail bridge just east of the existing Woolbridge, as well as concrete sidings at both Wool and the Camp were also initiated. The line itself would travel northwest along an embankment from the station, across the river, looping up and then down into the Bovington Lane dip before following a north, then north-west route, tracing what would later become Cologne Road and Duncan Crescent, and through into the eastern part of the camp towards the D & M School and the workshops.
A road crossing was also located where the line bisected the road in Bovington Lane and where the line later traversed a firing range, all firing had to be temporarily suspended whilst the trains passed, to the apparent annoyance of some of the instructors.
Running until November 4th 1928, the Wool Bovington railway transported tanks on 40-ton special wagons, designed by the Railway Executive Committee and consequently known as RECTANKS, with each of the two railway sidings at Bovington able to accommodate up to 24 RECTANKS each. Entraining tanks was a laborious job, requiring each of a tank’s two sponsons to be unbolted and gently pushed by another tank so they sat inside the tank’s interior. Tank designers needed to ensure that new designs could fit on rail flats so that they could pass other trains and through existing railway tunnels without impediment.
Given the difficulties of manoeuvring the early tanks, they were guided onto the wagons via a ramp located at the end with large numbers of tanks being brought back to Bovington Heath, from the Western Front, in 1919-1920 where they were ultimately broken up and scrapped. A fate that would befall the line itself in 1936, when it was dismantled, with only the embankment and concrete buttresses of the bridge remaining today.
Despite the loss of the Bovington Wool railway, it didn’t stop tanks being transported via Wool station, as rail was still the most efficient method of strategically transporting tanks significant distances to training areas and docks like Southampton, where they could be transported by ship to anywhere in the world. Moreover, despite the advent of road-based tank transporters in the late 1920s, the railway network was still extensively used to transport tanks through World War Two and into the 1990s.
However, as tanks have become larger and heavier, dedicated road tank transporters have largely replaced the railway as a means of transporting tanks on a daily basis, but the railways still provide the most efficient means of transporting large volumes of AFVs to ports or other locations.
