A bomb on a railway line in Russia yesterday, 27th November, causes me to bounce, in a mind map sort of way along a series of thoughts. Let me try and replicate this below with, excusing the pun, a progression of thoughts in a train. I’ll put a link or two at each “carriage” so you can dig detail if you wish. I’m limiting my thoughts to bombs under train tracks and not bombs on trains.
The explosion yesterday appears to have derailed the train, killing at least 26 people. Interestingly there was a second explosion some hours later a short distance away – details are not yet clear.
Devices placed on railway lines, detonated as the train passes aren’t new in Russia. One occurred in 2007. Two Chechen terrorists were charged with the crime.
Earlier in Russia’s history trains were attacked by IEDs by other terrorists. Tsar Alexander II was the target of an IED attack in 1879 when the Narodnaya Volya terrorist group attempted to attack his train by placing explosives under the railway Livadia to Moscow, but they missed the tsar’s train. The Narodnicks attacked the Tsar seven times, finally killing him in 1881.
One of history’s best train bombers, arguably, was Lawrence of Arabia, famous for attacks on the Turkish controlled railways in Arabia during the ”Arab revolt”. This excerpt from a letter to fellow officers from Lawrence.
In a letter to fellow officers describing one of his daring raids on a Turkish train, Lawrence vividly captures the excitement he felt fighting in the desert. The train, he wrote, “had two locomotives and we gutted one with an electric mine. This rather jumbled up the trucks , which were full of Turks shooting at us. We had a Lewis and flung bullets through the sides. So they hopped out and took cover behind the embankment and shot at us between the wheels at 50 yards.Then we tried a Stokes gun, and two beautiful shots dropped right in the middle of them. They could not stand that (12 died on the spot) and bolted away to the East across a 100-yard belt of open sand into some scrub. Unfortunately for them, the Lewis covered the open stretch.”
In other conflicts too, IED shave been used against trains. The diagram below is of an IED recently researched by a colleague in South Africa dating from the Boer war and was a Boer IED used to attack trains. The device uses the trigger of a rifle which is pressed when a train travels over it.
EXTRACT FROM PAGES 25 & 26 – TO THE BITTER END BY EMANOEL LEE
This incident highlights the Boers’ success in wrecking trains, which plagued Roberts and Kitchener throughout the war. No train was safe. At first they were derailed by setting off dynamite as the train passed. The attackers had to lie next to the line to light the fuse. This was highly dangerous, and the Boers subsequently developed a safer method of stopping trains without injuring passengers or damaging the supplies they needed. Old Martini-Henry rifles (for which there was no ammunition) were prepared by sawing off the butt behind the breech and removing the barrel a few inches in front of it. The trigger-guard was the removed and the breech opened. They inserted a cartridge without a bullet in the breech and placed a dynamite cartridge in the shortened barrel. Stones were then removed under the rail to make a hole, which was packed with dynamite. The mutilated breech of the rifle was then placed upside-down on top of the dynamite with the trigger just touching the rail. When a train passed, its weight made the rail sag and set off the trigger.’
Jumping back to modern times, and to demonstrate the potential vulnerability of rail systems, the terrorists responsible for the Madrid train bombings were believed to have planted a device under the tracks of a Madrid express train to carry out a subsequent attack but they all died when their safe house was discovered before this follow on attack could be launched. The 12kg device was found on April 2 2004 on the Madrid to Seville express line. Other islamist/Al Qaeda plots focused on train tracks are numerous.
In France a few years ago there was a bizarre extortion plot threatening trains that soaked up thousands of hours of track searching by the police.
Elsewhere, a wide variety of groups around the world have attacked train tracks and the trains that run on them. Northern Ireland, India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, etc etc, Here’s a couple of reports from India both in the last two weeks which demonstrate how commonplace such attacks are:
I think this ‘train of thought’ technique works quite well – please feel free to add your own carriages of related material – remember this thread is explosions of tracks to attack trains not bomb on trains.
Recent reports sugest the second device at the trackside in Russia was initiated by a cell phone.