RodentRevolution
Banned
Except the difference is rather than moving by sea across the Pacific, for example (20,000 men by August), they are moving via the New York Central... Or the Grand Trunk, Penn Central, Illinois, Rock Island Line, etc.
And directly from places like Burlington, Albany, Buffalo, and Detroit upon such places as Montreal (what, 40 miles north of the border?), Prescott, Toronto, Windsor, etc.
So in actual fact getting there is harder. Rather than being able to bring supplies in ships you must now transport them by horse. Rather than have the guns of Navy cruisers and battleships available you must bring your own.
If you read the not unflattering source materials made available on the US preparations for war in Cuba you will see it takes time to concentrate and organise an Army Corps.
Whereas whenever operation Imperial Storm kicks off, the British have to mobilize, cross the Atlantic, and then decide whether they are landing in Halifax, St. John, or Quebec City, or Montreal (although if it is winter, the last one is out); there's also the minor question of whether the Intercolonial and/or Grand Trunk are open or closed, given how close both are to the border for almost their entire length...
Slightly more of a challenger for Sir Redvers Buller et al to get from Aldershot to the banks of the Detroit than it is for Wesley Merritt to get from, say, Plattsburgh to Montreal.
Best,
Not really as he can catch a train too but that is why you get maybe forty two days as because that is the time frame it took the British to land an entire army Corps inside South Africa and the lead elements made it into contact with the enemy before then. So a proven but slightly harder deployment is being used as the baseline by myself.
After that overrunning Canada in the short term is off the cards. The British can build up forces in Canada at least as fast as the US can based on demonstrated abilities.
It is not a question of US commander being incompetent it is that the resources they need are not to hand, there are no corps staffs, insufficient artillery and insufficient horse transport to supply the army in the field.
In Cuba and the Philippines the horse transport issues were less of a problem as the troops were close enough to ports to have less need of such.
If Grover Cleveland kicks off the war before letter can be exchanged you can have a winter fight, otherwise you are going to need to string the crisis out till late 1896 and still give the by now potentially lame duck President an interest in going to war...though maybe say if Cleveland had some side effect from his cancer treatment that caused unknown brain damage that affected his moral judgement he might draw out the crisis for the express purpose of getting re-elected.
Even so the British can still land at Halifax and Quebec, I am trying to find what if any were the state of fortifications on the US side of the frontier, these might close the St Lawrence to river traffic but of course they cannot close the Canadian railways which are deeper into Canada.
Really a lot depends on when the conflict kicks off and how long it brews for. There are of course a lot more dynamics in play than just the armies and troop numbers.