battering train

battering train (plural battering trains)

1. (military, historical) A train of heavy artillery, such as battering rams and catapults, for siege operations.
   • 1823, [James Fenimore Cooper], chapter XXXVII, in The Pioneers, or The Sources of the Susquehanna; […], volume (please specify |volume=I or II), New York, N.Y.: Charles Wiley;  […], →OCLC:

     When the fire reached this barrier, it was compelled to pause, until a concentration of its heat could overcome the moisture, like an army impatiently waiting the operations of a battering train, to open its way to death and desolation.

   • 1844, Nathaniel Hawthorne, “Earth’s Holocaust”, in Mosses from an Old Manse. […], part II, New York, N.Y.: Wiley and Putnam, published 1846, →OCLC, page 141:

     Be that as it might, numberless great guns, whose thunder had long been the voice of battle,—the artillery of the Armada, the battering-trains of Marlborough, and the adverse cannon of Napoleon and Wellington,—were trundled into the midst of the fire.

• “battering train”, in Webster’s Revised Unabridged Dictionary, Springfield, Mass.: G. & C. Merriam, 1913, →OCLC.