The Weldon Railroad: America's Railway of Death

In The Gulag Archipelago, Alexander Solzhenitsyn wrote of the Salekhard-Igarka Railroad, which Stalin planned to run for about 1,000 miles above the Arctic Circle.  It came to be known as "the railroad of death," or the "dead road," and it was said that "beneath each tie two lie."  Political prisoners worked on the railroad in frigid winters and steamy summers.  A third of the prisoners are thought to have perished, between 40,000 and 100,000 dead.  The railroad was poorly constructed and never completed.

Destruction of Genl. Lee's Lines of Communication in Virginia (Library of Congress)

The closest thing to a railroad of death America has is the Weldon Railroad, officially the Petersburg Railroad, which ran from Petersburg, Virginia to Weldon, North Carolina, where it connected with lines leading to Wilmington, North Carolina as well as to the Deep South.  Lee wrote the Weldon Railroad off as indefensible as soon as the Federals arrived at Petersburg because the railway lay only a few miles beyond Northern lines.  Nonetheless, he successfully defended it for almost two months.

Deaths related to the Weldon Railroad stemmed from the fighting during the Siege of Petersburg during the summer of 1864.  The siege was the longest and bloodiest in American history, lasting 292 days.  Most of the casualties along the Weldon Railroad occurred during Grant's second offensive of the siege, June 20-July 1, 1864, and during his fourth offensive, August 18-21, 1864.  (He would launch nine offensives during the siege.)

The second offensive numbered among the widest-ranging and most ambitious of Grant’s offensives around Petersburg, ranging more than from White House Landing in the northeast to Staunton River Bridge in the southwest.  It ranked among the longest of his offensives around Petersburg, though not among the bloodiest.  The principal battles of Grant's second offensive were Jerusalem Plank Road (June 21-23) and Sappony Church/First Reams Station (June 28-29).  Including casualties from sharpshooting, skirmishing and shelling, the Federals in late June 1864 lost nearly 5,000 soldiers, including about 400 killed or mortally wounded and around 3,400 prisoners, and Confederate casualties approached 1,500 with approximately 200 killed or mortally wounded and 400 prisoners.

Map by Hampton Newsome

Losses during Grant’s fourth offensive, the deadliest of his nine offensives in proportion to the number of troops involved, were about 10,999 killed, wounded or missing among the Federals, and approximately 5,400 of about 56,795 Southerners present.  The fourth offensive's principal fights were (north of the James) Deep Bottom/Fussell's Mill (August 14-18) and (southside) Globe Tavern (August 18-21) and Second Reams Station (August 25).  Union killed, mortally wounded or prisoners in August for the campaign of 1864 were around 7,700, Confederate about 2,900. See Horn, The Battles for the Weldon Railroad, August 1864, 317-318.

Second Battle of Reams Station (Harper's Weekly)

Fighting along the Weldon Railroad was so lethal because so many of the casualties were prisoners.  More than half the approximately 9,400 Federal prisoners taken in late June and August may have perished.  See Cross, A Melancholy Affair on the Weldon Railroad, 177 (25 Vermonters killed or mortally wounded on June 23 and 407 captured of whom 226 died as prisoners).  The approximately 2,000 Confederate prisoners taken during late June and August probably did not fare too much better during their extended stay in beginning in late June and August due to Grant's policy of not exchanging prisoners during the 1864 campaign; Northern prison camps such as Elmira, New York ("Hellmira") may have had fatality rates of up to 25 percent. 

Thus the fighting for the Weldon Railroad may have resulted in the deaths of up to about 6,000 Federals and 2,000 Confederates.  Not many by Soviet standards, and we should be glad for that, but still the deadliest railroad in American history.  

Brief Bibliography

Cross, David Faris.  A Melancholy Affair on the Weldon Railroad: The Vermont Brigade, June 23, 1864.  Shippensburg, PA; White Mane, 2003.

Eanes, Greg.  Destroy the Junction: The Wilson-Kautz Raid and the Battle for the Staunton River Bridge.  Lynchburg, VA: H. E. Howard, Inc., 1999.

Horn, John.  The Siege of Petersburg: The Battles for the Weldon Railroad, August 1864.  El Dorado, CA: Savas Beatie, 2015.