2023-09-12 09:34:22
The leader of North Korea, Kim Jong-un, has traveled to Russia to meet with Putin not by plane, as it would be logical to think due to time and comfort, but on an armored train for the occasion. An extreme security measure, weeks after the mid-air death of Yevgeny Prigozhin, leader of the Wagner mercenary group, which the Korean dictator seems to have modeled after his father.
Throughout his life, the North Korean made a dozen trips abroad, almost all to China, in a spectacular green armored train. The train in question has around 90 carriages, conference rooms, a courtroom, bedrooms, satellite phones and televisions installed for briefings, as reported in 2009 by the conservative South Korean newspaper ‘Chosun Ilbo’.
It was always speculated that the choice of the train was due to Kim Jong-il’s fear that a missile would shoot down his plane, although it seems more likely that the somewhat more prosaic reason was that Korean aircraft fleet, with a Soviet fragrance, is too old and unsafe (state trips are carried out by this country on more modern planes rented from China). The most paradoxical of all is that, according to local media, Kim Jong-Il died in 2011 precisely on board his official train while he was on his way to an inspection visit to the outskirts of Pyongyang.
They were experimented with in the English colonial wars, in the American Civil War and in the Franco-Prussian conflict, although not always with great success.
The idea of using armored trains is not exclusive to dictators and was born with the birth of the railway itself, so that in the mid-19th century the first attempts to add defensive measures (metal plates, wooden planks and sandbags) and offensives (machine guns and cannons) to this important means of transport and, what was crucial, protect the monarchs and heads of state who crossed hot zones. He experimented with them in the English colonial wars, in the American Civil War and in the Franco-Prussian conflict, although not always with the same success. During the Boer Wars, Winston Churchill, who was working as a war correspondent, was traveling aboard an armored train when a rebel commando attacked the device and took the aristocrat prisoner along with a good part of the crew.
Kim Jong-un gets off his armored train, on his last visit to Vladivostok in 2019 afp
During the two world wars, Austria, Poland, Czechoslovakia and Germany They launched into the manufacture of these armored beasts that each country armed in its own way. However, it was the Russians who took this technology to the next level during their fratricidal conflict of 1917. The most famous vehicle of all was that of Leon Trotsky, the first president of the Military Revolutionary Council, which made 36 trips aboard a train with two armed locomotives and twelve cars with bathrooms, a meeting room, a printing press, a telegraph, two car garages and even a library. The Soviet armored vehicles were equipped with 6-inch cannons, machine guns and armor made of steel sheets. At the end of the war, the Bolshevik forces had 103 armored trains of all types.
Spain also had similar trains, as demonstrated during the Asturian Revolution in October 1934, and later in the Civil War. Both sides developed war machines that moved along the train tracks, wreaking havoc or, in the case of defensive armored vehicles, carrying the leaders of the war to safety. The republican workshops manufactured this type of transport throughout the territory under their control for very diverse purposes.
Aviation over time reduced the tactical importance of trains, which were easy to override from the skies, but they continued to be used to transport artillery and soldiers to the front in all types of scenarios that supported tracks. During the Indochina War, the French military used a special train called La Rafale and the Cuban army Fulgencio Batista operated an armored train during the Cuban Revolution. Furthermore, the Soviets used them throughout the Cold War. Even in the Ukrainian war, the use of an armored train consisting of two diesel locomotives has been reported to contribute to the southern flank of the Russian invasion.
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