All these plans had two drawbacks: each lavatory could serve only one compartment, which was wasteful of space, and each was also a bit too close to the seating area for comfort. Much better was to have some sort of transitional space, favouring hygiene and modesty at the same time – just as houses and offices are not usually designed with lavatories opening directly into their main living and working spaces. And so the side corridor began to come into its own.
Side-corridor carriages were not a new idea. The principle was first set out by the German railway engineer Edmund Heusinger von Waldegg in the wake of the railway murders of the 1860s, but found little immediate acceptance. How it could work is shown by the Great Northern Railway’s progressive-minded first-class carriage of 1881, with a gentleman’s lavatory cubicle at one end, a ladies’ at the other and a corridor alongside the four compartments in between. Another variant is represented by a composite design of 1911 for the Great Central Railway, the successor to the Manchester, Sheffield & Lincolnshire company. Each first-class compartment had its own direct-access cubicle, but the third-class compartments shared one between two, by means of a short side corridor or vestibule. In this case each third-class lavatory was held in common between seventeen passenger places, as against seven places in first class.
The Manchester, Sheffield & Lincolnshire Railway’s tri-composite carriage of 1880, showing the internal arrangements
All these vestibules and lavatories reduced the passenger load of the carriage. One way to mitigate the loss was to fix a fold-up seat on the outer face of the lavatory door. Some lines tried this in the 1890s. The expedient was liable to cause confusion. A correspondent to the Railway Magazine in 1899 recounted his alarm when travelling in a glass-fronted compartment of the coupé type on the Caledonian line. It happened that the next carriage also ended in a coupé compartment, in which two passengers were visible. Glancing up from his reading a little later, the correspondent noted that one of the two had apparently vanished. Frightening possibilities filled his mind, until the missing passenger suddenly reappeared from within the lavatory compartment that was masked by the middle seat.
The Railway Magazine’s man also reported that the company had begun to remove these extra seats, which no one much liked. It is not hard to see why. When the compartment was full, any sortie to the facilities required a polite request that the seat’s occupant should stand and make way. And what happened after that? If the displaced passenger sat down again, the visitor would have to tap on the door from the other side to be released. If the displaced person moved instead to the visitor’s temporarily vacant seat, a sort of pas de deux in the space between the knees of other passengers would be necessary before both could get back to their positions. If the displaced passenger proved unwilling to move back, the visitor was left to take a turn on the worst seat in the compartment. Serious embarrassment, one way or the other; much better to wait until the station, if you could manage it.
Lavatory compartments made carriages look different from outside, as little windows of frosted or engraved glass began to appear among the clear-glazed passenger compartments. The Great Central proudly chose a pattern for its lavatory glass comprising the company’s own coat of arms and motto (‘Forward’). Clear spots within the patterns and frostings allowed the passenger to keep an eye on the journey’s progress, saving unnecessary panic – for instance, when a signal stop might be mistaken for early arrival at the correct station. In turn, the experienced passenger at the platform could use these windows to help locate a compartment with lavatory access.
The contraptions provided within were comparably diverse. Those in the early saloon carriages, royal ones not excluded, were of the commode or close-stool type. The next step was to make a lavatory with a chute that could discharge directly on to the track. The best of these were of the valve type, in which the basin was kept filled with water. Flushing the lavatory released the water and the waste together. The Midland Railway developed an apparatus that flushed the valve automatically when the lid was closed. It refilled when the lid was lifted again. Cheaper installations made do with a metal pan that emptied by tipping sideways, or a fixed pan with a chute-hole towards the back that could be flushed through after use. The latter type in particular had the drawback of exposing the user to howling draughts from below, especially in colder weather and when the train was moving at speed. The remedy, not always pursued, was to fit a sprung flap at the bottom of the chute or at the back of the pan, to be forced open by the flush. The 1880s brought the washdown closet, in which a fresh discharge of clean water replaced the water and waste in the pan. This became the standard British type. Its chief disadvantage, as most people discover, is that it stops working as soon as the water runs out. The drawbacks of the other kinds will be familiar to many with experience of railway travel overseas.
Gentlemen visiting the facilities in the Great Northern’s carriage of 1882 were presented with a choice between a water closet and a urinal. This was unusual as well as wasteful of space, and the fittings were usually arranged more compactly. Square footage was often saved by the use of fold-down washbasins of nickel plate or some other metal, a type also much used in ships’ cabins. These could be fixed to the partition above the lavatory seat. Popular varieties included those patented by James Beresford, which drained through a hopper behind when pushed back upright. The foldaway type gave way in the early twentieth century to fixed basins, which encouraged the use of ceramics (equipped with push-type taps, which could not be left running). Even tiled walls and floors were not unknown. These have been replaced in turn by lighter and more robust fixtures of fibreglass, plastic or stainless steel. Now it is disconcerting to encounter ceramic basins and bowls in preserved railway carriages; the heavy and fragile material seems out of place, as if it had strayed from the immobile world of buildings and mains drainage.
Water for these fixtures had at first to be pumped up from a tank under the floor, by jerking hard on a pivoting handle. Later cisterns were placed higher up, either behind a partition or in the form of a tank under the roof, which also helped give impetus to the flush. The water for the basins was initially not heated, so a single cold tap was all that was needed. Hot water was a refinement of Edwardian times, which our traveller of 1912 would have encountered in the newer sorts of carriages – but only in the colder months, for the warmth came from the same circuit that operated the steam heating according to season. The lack of hot water in summer will be among the railway memories of older readers, not all of whom will have guessed the explanation.
Confusingly for us, washbasins were commonly called ‘lavatories’ by the Victorians. ‘Toilet’, a genteelism with transatlantic roots, may have become a familiar British usage in the twentieth century partly because the railways adopted it, according to Hamilton Ellis (who detested the ‘silly, mincing’ word). Some sort of unisex term was clearly required, especially as railway carriages generally gave up designating cubicles for men or for women shortly after the First World War. At stations, where separate facilities prevailed, the more oblique convention could be used, sign-posted simply as ‘Ladies’ or ‘Gentlemen’.
Some British railway lavatories are still of the washdown type, although these are fast giving way to the kind in which the waste is collected in an underfloor retention tank for later disposal. These were first used on British Rail in the sleeping cars introduced in 1981, of which more is said in Chapter 8. Since that time, the familiar notices requesting passengers not to flush while at stations have been disappearing from the nation’s trains. The more recent kinds are emptied by a startlingly sudden power-vacuum, rather than by flushing through from above. Their ancestry can be traced to the high-speed ‘bullet trains’ of the Tokaido line in Japan, opened in 1964 – well ahead of the vacuum toilets developed for the US space programme, or those used in airliners since the 1970s.
From the railways’ point of view, the best aspect of the old method was its dispersal of the waste naturally; the ballas
t between the tracks, combined with an element of speed in the discharge and the natural action of the weather, effectively turned the trackbed into something like a linear filter bed. The same could not be said of places where the line ran through a tunnel, although this is probably not something to which many travellers have ever given much thought. But it is impossible to excuse the shameful abuse of the rule against flushing at the station platform, to the extent that membranes of thick black plastic are sometimes now put down between the rails, to make clearing up easier. These open-air latrines may be seen at Paddington, for example (if anyone really wants to). The latest safeguard against the anti-social flusher, introduced in Scotland in 2012, links the toilet mechanism electronically to the train’s GPS satellite co-ordinates, so that discharges are made only beyond the station limits. There still remains the hidden burden of cleaning the undersides and wheelsets of the trains, spattered with dried-on filth across every surface and crevice – and doing so without imperilling the health of the workers in the carriage sheds. The faster the train, the worse the effects below the carriage floor. A time-travelling early-Victorian railway engineer might well be nonplussed at what the twenty-first century worker is expected to put up with.
In the matter of carriage wheels, the crucial change between 1862 and 1912 reflected the increasing lengths of carriages. Two or three fixed axles per vehicle were sufficient while wheelbases remained short, but anything longer required wheels that could swivel to follow the curvature of the rails. The lead was taken in the United States, where railroad tracks were often flimsily laid and followed tight serpentine courses. To overcome this problem the pivoting four-wheeled bogie was developed. This in turn favoured longer wheelbases: hence the type of large, open saloon coach which became usual in America in the 1840s. So the two traditions diverged early on, and British carriages (and most Continental ones) stayed small.
In the 1870s things began to change, when some progressive-minded British lines introduced longer carriages with fully pivoting four-wheeled bogies. Their interiors were of conventional form, and most passengers would probably not have noticed the difference in wheel arrangement, however much they may have appreciated the smoother ride. The same could not be said of another innovation of the 1870s, on the Midland Railway. Its manager James Allport toured the North American railroads from coast to coast in 1872. Here he encountered the luxurious new bogie coaches recently introduced by George Mortimer Pullman (1831–97). These ‘Palace cars’ came in two varieties, open saloons and sleeping cars (of which more in the next chapter). Impressed, Allport invited Pullman to make a presentation to the Midland’s next meeting of stockholders in 1873. The American then undertook to send over examples of both types from his works at Detroit in a sort of flat-pack form, for reassembly and operation under contract on the Midland’s rails. Central to the deal was that Pullman’s company would pay their operating costs over a fixed period, in return for the supplementary fees paid by the passengers on top of the Midland’s normal fare. Even the attendants on these trains were provided by Pullman, who initially brought men across the Atlantic for the purpose. Hoping to extend the business model across Britain and beyond, he named his new overseas enterprise the Pullman Palace Car Co. (Europe).
Some of the advanced features of these imported carriages – lavatories, oil-fired heating – have already been mentioned. Names, rather than numbers, were assigned to them, in a possibly unconscious revival of the earliest railway practice: Midland, Ohio, Enterprise, Victoria. Especially seductive were the saloons, or parlor cars (in the American usage). Their walnut-lined interiors presented the Briton with a deluxe version of the single spaces that had confronted Dickens and Trollope on their railroad explorations; The Times’s man on the trial run in 1874 was reminded of ‘a luxuriously appointed yacht’. Instead of bench-type seating, twin rows of velvet-trimmed swivel chairs of spoon-backed profile extended along the main space, which was flooded with light from close-set picture windows, a clerestory and (at night) a generous array of paraffin lamps. For those who preferred more privacy there were also two smaller compartments, each with a pair of swivel chairs and a sofa, reached via a short side corridor. Doors at each end of the car gave on to an open platform like a veranda, sheltered by a projection of the roof. These could be connected with the platforms of other Pullman cars to allow free passage through the moving train.
As with the Westinghouse brake saga, the encounter should have been transformative, an injection of fresh ideas into a hidebound, insular tradition. Certainly there was no shortage of publicity for the new cars; they even popped up in the plot of the Christmas pantomime for 1874 at Covent Garden (it was Babes in the Wood). The Pullman company’s readiness to supply rolling stock – effectively allowing the railway companies to contract out a service without sharing the financial risk – also had its attractions. Yet the British response was slow, and partial at best. Some resistance was encountered to the idea of paying a supplement, especially on the Midland: affronted letters to The Times accused the company of imposing an extra charge for what was a de facto replacement for the old first class, now that the company had done away with second class. And although several lines tried out the new coaches, only a handful took the concept of the premium-rate saloon to heart. In effect, the native tradition of simple pricing by class rather than by supplementary service survived on most trains, and it was as a niche operation that the British spin-off of the Pullman company found its place.
In the forefront of Pullman-friendly routes was the London, Brighton & South Coast; a surprising outcome, perhaps, as its main lines were shorter than most. Improved versions of the early parlor cars made up its ‘Southern Belle’ service, introduced in 1908 (‘The most luxurious train in the world’, as the posters had it), which managed the London-to-Brighton run in an hour. The association remained close enough to encourage the Pullman company to relocate in 1928 to a vacant workshop at Preston Park in the outer suburbs of Brighton. When the line was electrified in 1933, the Southern Belle was replaced by an electric version named the Brighton Belle. This ran until 1972, latterly in a rather ramshackle condition, but beloved nonetheless. Its demise was mourned in style; The Times reported that the last London service would depart after a performance of Hector Berlioz’s cantata Le chant des chemin de fer, composed in 1846 for the opening of the Paris–Lille railway and rarely dusted off since (Que de montagnes effacées! / Que de rivières traversées!). A coterie of regular travellers had done what they could to retain the service, including the thespian-Brightonians Dame Flora Robson and Lord Olivier; the latter’s successful defence of the kipper option on the train’s breakfast menu in the 1960s is still remembered in the seaside city.
Olivier’s kippers are a reminder that the provision of meals on the railways of Britain also owes much to George Mortimer Pullman. The crucial date was 1879, when one of his parlor cars was adapted for use on the Leeds expresses of the Great Northern Railway. Tables for dining were inserted between the pairs of seats in the middle section, between a little coke-fired kitchen at one end of the car and a smoking saloon at the other, so that gentlemen could withdraw for a cigar after their plates were cleared. The modified vehicle was renamed Prince of Wales, as if to hint at the pleasures of good living. The Midland carried out a similar conversion on two of its parlor cars in 1881–2; one was dubbed Delmonico after the celebrated New York restaurant company, then in its pomp.
The introduction of kitchen facilities brought into focus the open platforms at the ends of these early Pullman cars. These platforms, whose ancestry lay in the river-saloon prototype, were altogether alien to native traditions of carriage building. To British eyes they may have suggested a rather déclassé affinity with horse trams and omnibuses. (The platforms’ combination of foreignness and potential peril has since been reinforced for Anglo-Saxons by their many appearances in Westerns, usually as a place to leap for, shoot from or tumble off.) So the platforms of British Pullmans never became a normal means for p
assengers to move through the train. This in turn explains why one end of Prince of Wales could be reserved for a scullery. A further advance in design was required before the ordinary passenger could walk along the train to take a seat in a restaurant car, without having to go out into the open air – and the rain, and the dark – at every junction between the swaying carriages. Conversely, the dining car was condemned to remain an exceptional luxury unless it could be made to operate more like a restaurant, with multiple sittings if necessary, to make fuller use of an expensive specialist item of rolling stock.
The solution lay in a flexible enclosed gangway between the carriages. This too was an American invention, dating back to the 1850s. The concept crossed the Atlantic in the following decade, at first only as a means of joining together the new royal carriages of the London & North Western. That way, the Queen’s attendants could reach her person without the train having to stop (Victoria herself is reported never to have ventured through the gangway while the train was moving). For these carriages, a bellows-type connection was used. An improved connection was developed for Pullman saloon cars in the late 1880s, and this crossed the Atlantic too; it had an enclosed entrance vestibule at the carriage ends, with external doors that opened inwards – a peculiar arrangement to British eyes. But there was another way: the end gangway could be combined with the home-grown compartment plan, on condition that a corridor was provided along one side.
So the railways of Britain edged forward to the concept of the passenger train as a continuous internal space, not in one great leap, but by a series of niche-market luxury services and one-off conversions. What looks in retrospect like the point of no return was reached in the early 1890s, when innovative trains appeared on the Great Eastern and Great Western railways.
The Railways Page 26