THE RAILWAY COACH

Dominion, Volume 23, Issue 80, 28 December 1929, Page 22

THE RAILWAY COACH

INFLUENCE OF A TRADITION PROGRESS IN DESIGN In order to see what improvements in the design of passenger compartments were possible the London and North Eastern Railway Company (states the Lotadon “Times”) recently offered prizes in connection with the Industrial .Designs Competition of the Royal Society of Arts for designs of first or third class compartments. The result, however, was disappointing, for the judi es reported that most of the entrants failed to display originality or inventive talent. In the following article the evolution of present-day railway coach design is traced. Though they are the oldest in the world British railways have only about a century behind them, so that, happily, there is little difficulty in tracing almost every step in their development; it is the more easy, too, because little that goes on in the railway world eScapes notice. Of the immense changes which have been made in railways, none, perhaps, is more marked than those relating to coaches—as carriages are officially known- —and locomotives, and contemporary drawings of these alone furnish abundant evidence of the changes, while showing equally clearly how slow we have been to make them.

In designing its first railway coaches, a less conservative nation than ours would, perhaps, have broken with the coachbuilders’ tradition, but in the first flush of the new method of locomotion it doubtless seemed quite natural to the managers of the earliest railways that the most simple way of conveying those who had carriages would be to take them in their own; and so the family coach or landau strapped to a truck provided an alternative to the earliest first class vehicle for “carriage folk,” who counted for so much in those days. Less important people travelled in open trucks resembling the smaller goods wagons of the present day and furnished with benches. These primitive methods, of which the novelty overshadowed the simplicity at first, soon went by the board. The influence of the horse carriage, however, was seen in the design of it successors, mainly, no doubt, because for some time they were made by coaclibuilders; and so strong was the coaching tradition that faint traces of it may still be seen in the design of railway carriages. Exposure to Weather. Cinders and sparks from the locomotive, especially in tunnels, as well as the asperities of the weather, made roofed carriages necessary, and they were soon forthcoming for those who could afford to pay for the protection. In the earlier railway carriages compartments were rare, and both first and second class were like small saloons with the seats ranged along the sides, a table in the middle, and an air of roominess. The pristine second class carriages had neither doors nor sides, so that passengers for whom there was no room at the ends were, perforce, exposed to the weather, a fate which all the time pursued indigent folk, for whom there was no shelter at all in third class carriages. That unpleasant state of affairs, however, roused a storm of protest, and in 1844 Parliament compelled the railway companies to provide adequate shelter for all passengers. So adequate was this in the case of third class travellers—who then and for long afterwards had short shift from the railways—that they were completely boxed in, the third class carriage resembling a milk van of the present day. These boxed vans had no windows and for ventilation the tops of the side panels were fitted with louvres, and not till four years later were small panes of glass substituted for the louvres. Even then, however, the .“windows” were so high up that no ordinary being could look out without craning his neck. r On the early enclosed carriages of all classes luggage was strapped on to the roof, and exposed to the w’eather, though later on it was covered with tarpaulins. Time was of less account then than it is now, but the recovery of passengers’ luggage at their destination was such a long and tedious business, especially in dirty weather, that a more expeditious method had to be found.

It soon came in the precursor of the guard’s van of to-day, which the parents of the present generation will recollect and still refer to as the luggage van. At first the guard had no place in this, for he was perched aloft in a seat recessed into the roof of the last coach with the brake wheel at his hand; and as there were no other brakes but those on the engine wheels, the process of pulling up a train was a slow and laborious one, often accompanied by the pungent smell of the charring wood of which the brake-blocks were made. Second-Class Tradition. As the various lines settled down to regular working, the travelling Englishman’s innate desire for privacy made Itself felt, and the saloon type of coach gave way to that divided into compartments, the forerunner, in fact, of the coach of to-day. An example of one of the first of these stands at Waterloo terminus. Except for the springs, wheels, and axles, these were made of wood; they had four wheels, and a journey in them must have been something of a trial. But in those days speed was low, and for a time they served well enough for travellers who were used to te inequalities of most of the roads of the country. When these coaches were built, and indeed fo long afterwards, more attention was paid to the conveyance of passengers than of goods; commercially the patronage and comfort of the affluent weighed more with the railway directors than the convenience of the people, and so a second class compartment was generally found next to a first, in order that the seigneur’s lackey or his lady’s woman might be close at hand. From that arose the tradition —finally killed by the War —that servants enjoyed a right to travel second class. The compartment coach was soon developed, and from three compartments the frame was lengthen to contain six. The extra length involved a third pair of wheels, and so the six-wh" fie 1 coach came into being. For more than 50 years it shared the brunt of the passenger traffic of the country with the older four-wheeled vehicle, and, though altered ih detail, both types are still in common use. The springing of the coach bodies has been immensely improved, and the buffering too, and even at high speed a passenger in a fourwheeled coach is less like a pea on a drum than he was 50 years ago. That each has long outstayed its welcome is due to the excellence of railway carriage construction and our inherent inability to throw anything on to the scrap heap until it is obviously done for. No attempt was made to light the earlier coaches, so night travelling was not popular! those who had to travel

after dark avoided the discomfort by carrying their own travelling lantern, which was merely a candle in a glassfronted metal case provided with a hook so that it could be fixed temporarily to the stuffing of the back of the seat. After a time a wick lamp, usually burning rape oil, was placed in the roof of each compartment. For a long time tunnels were traversed in darkness during the daytime, to the undoing of children and nervous people, but the murder of a passenger in Balcombe tunnel by Lefroy in 1881 quickened the supersession of oil for train lighting by gas.

Chilly passengers suffered acutely in winter, and if they did not bear their sufferings patiently or dumbly, they bore them resignedly, because there seemed to be no remedy for a more or less traditional s.tate of things that was only partly relieved by the tin hotwater bottles which made their first appearance soon after the Great Exhibition of 1851. “Central heating” of trains was then as much in the future as continuous brakes, lavatories, communication between passengers and guard, corridor coaches, and other developments which are now part of the regular equipment of trains.. The credit for the application of a method which originated in the United States seems to belong to the Great Western Railway, for, in 1892, a steam-heated corridor train took its place in regular working on that line. Pullman cars, which had been in use on the Midland Railway eighteen years before that, were warmed in winter, and the Ameri-can-built club train which began working between Charing Cross and Hastings in 1892 was heated throughout. The First Pullman. It is probable that travellers owe more comfort to the bogie underframe than to any other development. Whatever the reason, it is certain that for many years most of the locomotive engineers of our railways, who were then usually responsible for carriage as well as locomotive design, looked askance at the bogie carriage. It was employed sparingly on the Brighton Railway and the South Eastern, and Patrick Stirling, the famous locomotive engineer of the Great Northern Railway, would have none of it. It had much the same reception at Crewe, and only the locomotive superintendent of the Midland line was sufficiently long-sighted to appreciate the bogie truck at its full value. There is little doubt that, like the provision of lavatories, carriage heating, and the flexible connection between coaches, the bogie truck owes its origin here to the Pullman car, which was introduced by the Midland Railway in 1874 and. excited such interest that, on the occasion of the trial trip of a train of four cars from St. Pancras to Bedford, “The Times” devoted a column and a half to an account of it. The locomotive superintendent of the Midland Railway was so satisfied with the working of Pullman cars that he designed new coaching stock on bogie trucks and with clerestory roofs —another characteristic feature of the Pullman car; and so were born the familiar standard Midland coach and its counterpart, the even more familiar Great Western coach with clerestory roof, for when William Dean was transferred from Derby to Swindon in 1878 he introduced the Midland type of coach to the Great Western line.

Prejudice, poverty, and the long life of the old four and six-wheeled coaches delayed the general adoption of the bogie coach as the standard passenger vehicle, but few other types are built by the railways now. The coaches have been lengthened till the convenient limit has been reached, and steel is taking the place of wood as the material of construction,- with a consequent saving of weight. Electricity is displacing gas for lighting. Designs tend in the same direction, and the clerestory roof was doomed some time ago. Except in the communication cord, there is no standardisation of detail such as seemed possible after the War, and each railway group is a law to itself. Seats vary in their width and the angle of their backs; door locks, windows, lighting, heating, all are different. On some lines the luggage racks are ample, on others they are niggardly. On others, again, the front of the seat is carried S o j ow — as if by intent —that no suitcase can be pushed under the seat even where there is no hot pipe. Lavatories are rarely roomy enough, and in no restaurant car are the racks large enough, because, theoretically, no doubt, coats, hats, and handbags are left in the compartment.