Military Railway Service

[NW Mailing List]

A new book, Trains to Victory, America's Railroads in World War II 
(Donald Heimburger and John Kelly, Heimburger Publishing, 2009), will be 
of interest to listers who have followed the Military Railway Service 
(MRS) story in the wake of reporting in the Arrow early in the last 
decade.  I secured a copy for review via the inter-library loan service.

The volume, an extended photographic essay (380 pages, 8.5" x 11" 
format) includes N&W graphics of the period.  Attention in the main is 
upon home-front action by the nation's railroads.  MRS training in the 
US and engagement in overseas theaters are subjects included moderately 
within the story.  The failure to cite, road by road, the overseas 
theater deployment of US road-sponsored MRS units (as N&W and the 755th 
railway shop battalion) is an unfortunate omission that still awaits 
coverage in a non-military publication.

Some listers trained and served at Fort Eustis, VA, which in 1946 became 
the training center of the Transportation Corps, a component of which 
was the Military Railway Service.  The volume offers extensive 
photographic coverage of Eustis, a bonus being shots of US Army S-160 
2-8-0 steamers, the very engines which N&W's 755th men in Belgium kept 
on the rails during the Battle of the Bulge in the bitter winter trial 
of '44-'45.

Frank Gibson