Railroading to a conclusion

The Union army at the Battle of Rouses Point is a mystery - not just in terms of their tactics and armament, but the size of the army itself is also open to question.
At times we are told that the British are outnumbered "greater than 2 to 1", but the actual Union order of battle consists of one division (Hooker's) plus Kearny's cavalry, plus the 8th NY Militia Brigade and two regiments of NY volunteers (for perhaps 11,000 infantry, 3,000 cavalry and 1,000 artillery all told). The British, for their part, have roughly 10,000 men, and as any fule kno 15,000:10,000 is not greater than 2:1. (We are also told in a separate section that there are 12,000 regulars and volunteers, and another 3,000 militia; either way this is still 15,000 but shows a distinct disregard for consistency).



That said, the Union army is still large enough to pose a major logistical challenge to move. Surely the author has fairly reflected the difficulty of this movement?




Of course not.



When?
In a conference taking place in February, the narration notes that it is "almost two months" after the original 27 December 1861 meeting in the war room - thus the conference is at the latest on the 26th February. During this same conference, the language used:



“Very well, Mr. President – west of New England we have formed the Department of the North, covering northern New Hampshire, Vermont, and northern New York; Heintzelman is in command at Albany, with his old division, now under Hamilton, as well as General Hooker's division, and now Blenker is also on the way…all three are detached from the Potomac Army. General Kearny has a cavalry brigade; given his fluency with French, it seems an inspired choice. The department’s forces also include the appropriate state militia units, including brigades from New York and Vermont, and Col. De Trobriand’s special force at Plattsburgh.



makes it clear that Hooker's division and Kearny's brigade are already in place (with Blenker being the only one still moving into position). It is also stated that



“These numbers are from before the troop movements that began this past week, but on the 15th, the Department of the Potomac reported 212,000 present for duty; the Missouri, 109,000; the Ohio, 73,000; and Western Virginia, 17,000. The rest were split between New England, the East Coast, and the departments of Virginia, Kansas, New Mexico, and the Pacific, along with the various expeditionary forces on the Atlantic and Gulf coasts…”



From the admittedly sparse hints in this text, it is possible to divine that the movement to Plattsburgh took at most ten days (16 Feb to 26 Feb) and possibly as few as three ("This past week", with the 26th Feb being a Wednesday). This length of time is the amount of time that is taken to move 15,000 men and at least 3,000 horses to Rouses Point. This would result in a largely static force (with no transportation to move their supplies) but we will grant the Union the benefit of the doubt and assume the wagons and associated horses would be moved in closer to the thaw - perhaps during March.






With this information (and bearing in mind that the movement to Plattsburgh is not the only movement taking place) we can proceed to examine the railway routes.
The below map shows the rail routes in Canada in detail, but also includes the routes in the Union during 1861:



Rail lines



Close examination shows that there are two possible routes to reach the area of Rouses Point, one to the east of Lake Champlain (and crossing near the border) and one far to the west (this being the Rome, Watertown and Ogdensburg railway or the RW&O). The RW&O is not worth considering for this analysis as it would be busy moving men and supplies to various points along the St Lawrence frontier and the lake frontier, and would be heavily overworked doing this - a single track light line, historically it had two two-way train journeys per day and no telegraph signalling. (The ability of this line to support any kind of military operations is questionable; expecting it to support operations from Rouses Point to Watertown defies belief.)









The route along the east side of Lake Champlain has two possible choke points, these being the Rutland-to-Burlington component of the route and the Burlington-to-Rouses-Point component.
Let's consider the possible problems with the route.
Volume of traffic



The route from Rutland to Burlington and the route from Burlington to Rouses Point both took a very small amount of traffic, with only a few trains a day taking the route from Rutland to Burlington and a few back the other way. This low level of capacity led the lines to manage 40,000 to 50,000 through passengers each year.
The timetables are below.
Troy to Rutland
Rutland to Burlington
Burlington to Rouses Point






Single Track Mind
Could these lines step up their ability to carry passengers in wartime?
While possible, there is a problem with this option – the problem is that the lines are both single tracked, not the more familiar double-tracked rail line which can take trains in both directions at once. A single track line is only able to take as many trains as the sidings will allow in a given day – once the sidings are all full, the trains must then all be run back down the track again to clear the route for another set of train journeys. To do otherwise is to risk catastrophic collision, especially as the provision of telegraph cable to help control train journeys was by no means widespread in the United States at the time (especially for what amounts to a backwoods rail line).
This also means that the locomotives are in heavy demand, of course – not a small concern if one is overworking a rail line, especially since there are gauge differences between the Vermont Central / Vermont and Canada and the lines which connect to it.



Carriages



Another problem, however, is that if one does step up the capacity of one of these rail lines – there are few spare passenger cars. Most of the additional capacity would be in the standard cattle cars which the lines do have in abundance, and which are unheated – a critical problem for sending large numbers of men hundreds of miles, often at night, through the depths of a northern winter. (Even today, the average temperature in February is around 18 F / -8 C, risking exposure and frostbite for men in unheated cattle cars.)



Under repaired
With these rail lines, however, a worse concern is that the quality of the materiel (track, rolling stock and locomotives) is very poor even under the light use we have seen it experiencing.
The route suffered from a chronic lack of investment:



'Mainline track gradually became a vast obstacle course over which crews negotiated clanking, leaking engines hauling strings of fugitives from the jammed bad order tracks. The rotting platforms at the scabrous stations became a menace to passengers even before they boarded the sway-backed, reeling cars... Because of the condition of the railroad's trackage, its frequent wrecks, and the almost total absence of any car maintenance, several of these connecting roads also refused to deliver their cars at junction points, forcing added costs on the hard-pressed Rutland line, which then had laboriously to transfer the mainfests to its own battered sway-backed cars.'
One thing is clear, however – this rail system was not in good repair in any aspect.



To suddenly attempt to move roughly as many men down the line in three days as would normally take three months would result in a considerable overloading of the line beyond what produced the above conditions. It is by no means impossible, or even unlikely, that a catastrophic failure would result if the tempo of rail operations was raised by much over the historical.






Fuelling the line



Rail lines require their own system of logistical support – water for boilers, coal for bunkers – which needs to be provided to the stations in advance of trains actually arriving there. For a surge of movement such as the one required here, the demands would jump radically – consuming what would normally last weeks in a matter of days.
As a consequence of this, any major rail movement would need to include space for logistics. Not just for the men and the horses (though 15,000 men and 3,000 or more horses would consume a large amount of food) but for the rail itself.






Lessons from history



A good illustration of how this was taken into account historically is how the Union moved troops from Rouses Point south in the OTL – they hired steamers, rather than rely on the rail lines
https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=mdp.39015018441314;view=1up;seq=110












It is theoretically possible that the strategic movement described could take place, by cramming thousands of Union troops used to the Potomac into unheated cattle boxcars and sending them northwards during below-freezing temperatures, while wearing non-standard uniforms and taking poorly maintained trains over mis-handled tracks. It is more likely, however, that the Union would use the regular passenger cars (perhaps increasing the rate a bit) in order to avoid half the army coming down with frostbite, resulting in a much slower but safer buildup.






A Bridge Too Far



But perhaps the worst component of all for the Union is that this route - a critical supply route, even once the army is in place - goes over Lake Champlain by way of two pontoon bridges, one crossing to Rouses Point from the area of Alburg and the other crossing from East Alburg to West Swanton. There is no mention of any kind of bridge guard, in spite of how these bridges would instantly impede the Union's strategic position if destroyed.
We are told that the 1^st Vermont Militia holds a “thin line of blockhouses and fortified barns” as pickets on the other side of the lake, but with two fronts to protect (either side of Missisquoi bay) a single Vermont militia regiment will not be able to stop a British regular brigade.
Stranger still, the 1^st Vermont is described as under Colonel Joseph Bush – who was actually a captain in the 13^th US Regular Infantry at the time, with his position as Colonel of Militia taken by Charles H. Joyce prewar.



Conclusion

When one compares this blithely executed move to the way TFSmith describes the British sledge route through the Maritimes - a route which in reality was sufficiently efficient that the main limiting factor was the ability to provide passenger cars to Riviere du Loup - then the bias involved is clear. Rather than do any research, TFSmith concludes that the Union movement succeeds in transferring a complete division plus cavalry brigade (and presumably heavy artillery to boot) in one week; rather than do any research, he concludes that the British movement fails to transfer more than a small party of cavalry officers in three months.