Travel speed, overland movement, etc.

[Blacky]

Just in case someone here as some data. Not satisfied with what is usually inside rpg, I'm looking for serious sources for various travel speed basically from the 16, 17 and 18th centuries (my immediate needs is for Warhammer, but my real need is more global than that), or earlier.

Travel on feet, on horses, with and without wagons, on coaches, with and without relays for fresh horses, on roads goods and bads, in country or forest, river travel with and without sails, down-current and with towpath, etc.

I've started gathering data, but finding reliable sources is hard.

If anyone has any data on this topic, with reliable sources, I'm quite interested.

[dr_venture]

FWIW, I looked around quite a bit on the movement rates of wagon trains in westward movement in the American old west, so circa mid 19th century. These tended to be larger groups of wagons mostly pulled by oxen (cheaper, ate wild forage, valuable after arriving in the west, and less likely to be stolen by Indians along the way)... so definitely not a well-oiled military group or fast moving adventurers.

Daily travel for these groups averaged about 10 miles per day, with some days as little as 0 miles, and as much as 18. This depended greatly on terrain, condition of wagons and health of animals and people, crossing rivers, etc. Group movement was often the rule (as opposed to leaving slow pokes behind) due to a desire to keep everyone together for safety whenever possible... especially if the area was considered hostile territory.

Travel by this method was slow, as this was on mostly unimproved wagon roads - no gravel or grading, and prone to being muddy in wet weather and very bumpy. A broken wheel or wagon tongue or axle could stop the whole train for several days. Rigging a wagon to cross a river deeper than a few feet involved either building a raft, or caulking the cracks in the wagon to make a boat out of it and swimming the animals across - all very time consuming. Wagon slides were steep areas where wagons were lowered down very steep slopes via ropes, while animals were unhitched and led down. Even steep hills which a wagon could be driven down often required small trees be felled and tied to the uphill side of the wagons as draggable anchors.

Still these folks were in a hurry to get where they wanted to go, as they had to leave late enough so that animal forage had time to grow after the winter, but early enough that the other wagon trains ahead of you hadn't already eaten all the forage, and so that you weren't caught by any early winter storms in the Sierras.