"We are peaceful people, but our armored train is on a siding..." - this song, which the whole country sang before the war, turned out to be prophetic: it was the Great Patriotic War that was destined to become the last great war of armored trains - in 1941-1945. More than 200 “steel fortresses” of the Red Army actively participated in the hostilities. And although many theorists considered this branch of the military to be hopelessly outdated, Soviet armored trains actually proved their high combat effectiveness, especially in the first period of the war, when their construction became truly massive. , - both in terms of quantity and quality of armored trains, the USSR surpassed all other participants in World War II combined! However, this topic has not actually been covered in domestic literature so far. This book is the first. Collecting material for it for more than 20 years, processing and analyzing a colossal amount of information, tracing the combat path of all the “land battleships” of the Red Army, the leading historian of armored vehicles created not just the best, but the only encyclopedia of armored trains of the Great Patriotic War to date.