The Railway That Helped Win the Crimean War : Frontline Books : 9781526775559 : 1526775557 : 30 Jun 2022 : Week after week, the guns of the British expeditionary force battered away at the defenses of Sevastopol, eight miles away from Balaklava, the port through which all besiegers' supplies arrived. As autumn turned to winter, rain and frost turned the track from Balaklava into a muddy quagmire and soon it became virtually impassable.Horses were dying daily in their endeavors to pull carts up the hills to the siege lines, and with few supplies reaching the front, the troops suffered terribly from malnutrition and frostbite. Unless a solution could be found, the entire operation was doomed to humiliating, disastrous failure.When news of the terrible plight of the troops reached the UK, a leading railway contractor and his partners undertook to build a railway at cost from Balaklava to the front line ? and promised that they could construct it in just three weeks after they arrived in t