PROBABLY the best-known image of railways in wartime is of the lines leading into the Auschwitz death camp.

Christian Wolmar reveals that from “places where the Germans were keen to maintain the myth that the Jews were simply being ‘resettled in the east’, the victims travelled in third-class carriages.” But their tickets were for only one way.

Most victims, of course, were crammed into cattle wagons, each usually containing between 100 and 150 victims, with no food or water and only a single bucket as a latrine. Wolmar notes: “The average journey time was more than four days as the trains were given the least priority and consequently were frequently stabled in sidings for days at a time. The longest journey involved a train from Corfu, which took 18 days to reach its destination. When it arrived, there were only corpses on board.”

The Auschwitz horror occupies less than a page in Wolmar’s comprehensive account of railways in war. Their debut came in the Crimean War (1853-56) when Britain initiated the building of a railway to ease the movement of troops and supplies during the siege of Sevastopol.

A later conflict in the Sudan (often relived in Dad’s Army by Corporal Jones) featured the building of a railway in the desert.

“The crucial innovation,” explains Wolmar, “was a moveable railhead, a canvas town of 2,500 inhabitants, complete with station, stores, post-office, telegraph office and canteen.

“The town had only three days reserve of water, and had the railway been broken for a longer period, its population would rapidly have perished of thirst.”

Britain’s foremost writer on railways, Wolmar unearths or highlights much else of equal interest. But this must be said: if there is to be a future for paperback reprints in the world of the ebook, they will need to be printed in larger, more reader-friendly type than that used here.