THE aftermath of the largest battle of the First World War on the Western Front is being marked with an exhibition highlighting how ‘hospitals on wheels’ brought casualties back to Britain.

Descendants of ambulance train medical staff gathered with historians at the National Railway Museum in York to mark the centenary of the busiest ever day for the purpose-built hospital-style vehicles during the conflict.

Over the course of the war, the trains, which were shelled despite featuring a red cross, transported 2.7 million passengers in the United Kingdom, including several renowned war poets – Siegfried Sassoon and Wilfred Owen among them.

To support the trains, rest rooms were created across the railway network to temporarily take the wounded troops.

The trains were also used on the Western Front, the Mediterranean and Egypt.

It is thought that within a week of the start of the Battle of the Somme, 6,000 injured troops were put onto ambulance trains and taken to hospitals across the country for treatment.

Caroline Stevens, whose ancestor Kate Evelyn Luard worked on an ambulance train in France throughout the war, said: “My great-aunt carried out her duties with unfaltering composure and dedication to those in her care under difficult and often dangerous conditions and was one of the few nurses to be awarded a Bar to her Royal Red Cross.”

Others attending included Alan and Richard Willis, the son and grandson of George Owen Willis, who served as an orderly on ambulance train number 18, and documented his experiences with photographs.

The display features extracts from the numerous letters Ms Luard sent back to her family from France and photos by Mr Willis.

The exhibition explores stories of the wounded soldiers who travelled with their harrowing memories of warfare, the medical staff who worked in claustrophobic conditions and the railway workers who built the trains.

The centrepiece of the exhibition is a carriage from the period that has been transformed to recreate the atmosphere on board an ambulance train. The carriages featured basic wards – rows of bunk beds for casualties – pharmacies, nurses’ mess rooms and treatment rooms.

Alison Kay, archivist at the museum, said the exhibition commemorated the heroic efforts of staff who lived on board the ambulance trains to evacuate the wounded soldiers from the battlefields.

She said: “After years of hard work and careful research, we are pleased to finally bring these stories which have been lying dormant for almost a century back into the public eye.”

Ms Kay said a week after the Battle of the Somme started, the ambulance trains were starting to deal with the backlash of the first days of battle.

She said: “It was a huge operation.

“Throughout the war, York was a receiving station, and these went right up to the top of Scotland. We have examples of soldiers from York being sent as far as Glasgow for treatment.”

For more information, visit nrm.org.uk/ambulancetrains