Railway Carriages

Press, Volume CIV, Issue 30895, 30 October 1965, Page 4

Railway Carriages

Railway Carriages in the British Isles. By C. Hamilton Ellis. Alien and Unwin. 279 pp. Mr Ellis has produced another detailed historical review of railway practice; this time a well-illustrated revision of an earlier book on nineteenth century railway carriages. For the model builder, the illustrations and lists of major dimensions, together with comments on livery, are generally sufficient to enable construction of good replicas in the smaller scales. Perhaps the most interesting aspect of this book, and it is one to which the author gives only passing reference, is the picture of railway engineers continually building for the wrong market. From the start, railway accommodation reflected, as closely as the Victorians could contrive, the social levels of the travellers. Only by Parliamentary pressure were the railway companies persuaded to run trains for the poor, and the development of the railway carriage culminated in a lush opulence toned down by marked degrees for the general travellers of descending status. The successive royal trains grew from roughly-sprung postchaises to articulated suites decorated inside to resemble the royal yacht. Along with the coaches reserved for royal use went the semi-royals which, when not coupled to the royal train, could be hired at not less than so many first class fares, for the busy magnate or the family man with a retinue of servants; the latter of course being seated in a separate compartment reached through the lavatory. The breaks in the amazingly solid conservatism of British railway engineers came from America: the saloon coach, the automatic coupling, the electric underground railway. By the end of the nineteenth century corridor trains were in and railway plumbing had reached standards which survive today. The motives for adopting corridor trains were varied, but one contributing factor was that murders occurred in non-corridor trains between stops, the un-

fortunate , victims being unable to signal their distress. For the New Zealand readers, perhaps the most interesting aspect of railway carriage design is the problem of what can be built on the narrow gauge. It may come as no surprise to those who question the Railways Department in vain to learn that dining cars, buffet cars and sleeping ears have all run successfully on narrower track than ours. The problem is not technically insuperable; it is also partly economic and partly a matter of finding railway engineers with initiative. Perhaps we may yet see tourist traffic attracted to railcars with front and rear observation windows, and comforts that derive from aircraft engineering precedents and not, ultimately, from either Victorian quilted leather smoking rooms or the street cars of New York.