35TH ENGINEERS

[NW Mailing List]

As a retired Engineer officer I am a member of the Army Engineer Association.  In the November/December issue there is a great story on the 35th Engineer Regiment, formed at the request of GEN Pershing at Camp Grant, Illinois.  This regiment, composed of 3 battalions of about 225 men each, formed in September, 1917 and shipped out to France in January 1918.  Their mission was to rehabilitate the freight cars of the severely damaged French railroad to move supplies to the fighting forces at the front.  Complicating their mission was the fact that living and working facilities were basically non-existent or so severely destroyed by fighting that they nearly had to be built from scratch - not just car repair shops and equipment, but living and messing quarters as well.
 
After the first repaired car rolled out of the shops in March 1918, the 35th repaired and built box cars, flat cars, low side gondolas, high side gondolas, ballast cars, tank cars and refrigerator cars.  And of course, being Americans, they not only repaired existing European cars with a capacity of some 10 tons, they increassed the capacity of the newly built and rehabilitated cars up to 30 tons; thereby improving the capacity of the Allied forces to supply more logistics to the front.
 
After assembling 224 cars in that first month of March 1918, the 35th Engineers improved their output to 2,370 cars in September of 1918.  As the war wound down and demand lessened, so did the output of the 35th, and in May 1919, the last of the 35th left LaRochelle, France and Camp Pullman (ironic name!) to return to the USA.  These railway-men turned soldiers spent 17 months in France and built over 17,000 cars to help turn the tide against the Kaiser.
 
Is anybody familiar with this story and did the N&W supply any members of the 35th Engineer Regiment?  I've seen articles on the great job done by N&W men in WWII but can't recall anything about their fathers in WWI.  As an aside, I recently watched a video on the history of the Alaskan RR and was happy to see that a unit I was assigned to prior to shipping out for RVN, the 714th TBROS&DE, was recognized as playing a part in the construction of that railroad.
 


Ed Svitil
Norfolk & Western Railway
 
  


 		 	   		  
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