The Great Eastern came up with a trio of permanently coupled carriages, of which the middle vehicle contained a small dining saloon and a kitchen. At one end was a first- and second-class composite, at the other an all-third-class carriage, both with corridors alongside the compartments. Third-class passengers had to troop through the kitchen to dine, but that was a small price to pay for equal access to these alluring new facilities. The carriages operated on the lines running cross-country to Harwich, which was then flourishing as a port for sailings to the Low Countries. The route carried a healthy traffic from northern England across East Anglia, and the journey was long enough to coincide with one or other of the day’s main mealtimes.
These Great Eastern carriages were still of the old-fashioned six-wheeled type. The Great Western’s ambitions were grander. After years of complicated co-existence it had finally abandoned Brunel’s broad gauge in 1892, converting the last remaining tracks to standard width. Its new corridor train was meant to show that the company was looking to the future. The four carriages were mounted on bogies in the up-to-date manner, which allowed for a greater length – at 50ft each, more than a third longer than the Great Eastern’s. Its corridors gave every passenger access to a lavatory, and also a choice between ordinary compartments and a small smoking saloon in each carriage. What they did not yet do was allow the curious or the sociable to go from one carriage to another: the gangway doors were kept locked and were meant purely for the use of the guard. Thus, in effect, were the first-class facilities defended against the third-class intruder. There was some logic to this: with no dining-car service on offer, there was no good reason to go wandering except vulgar curiosity, or a quest for a better class of toilet.
One operational disadvantage of these early carriages was that the end gangways lined up with the corridor, off the central axis. That was helpful to the luggage-laden, who could walk through in a straight line; but it ignored the possibility that a carriage might be reversed by 180 degrees in the course of normal working, so that what had been a right-hand gang-way ended up obstructively on the left, or vice versa. The solution was to insert a vestibule or passage at each end of the carriage, connecting to a gangway placed on the centre line. The left-over space thus created alongside became the obvious place to put the lavatory compartment.
Further refinements followed. In particular, the side corridor helped to break the convention that every compartment should have its own external door. Instead, carriages could have doorways opening directly into the vestibules, making a sort of cross-passage at each end. An early example was the sequence of splendidly sleek-sided express carriages built from 1904 for the Great Western, which measured up to 70ft long, a figure not routinely exceeded in Britain until the 1970s. Following the Edwardian fondness for topical nicknames, these became known as ‘Dreadnoughts’, after the giant Royal Navy battleships of the day. The plan-type represented one further step away from the origins of the railway carriage as a composite of cell-like spaces. Instead, the interior became more like an elongated building, in which a few external doors led to a linear circulation space with internal doors, each opening to the individual ‘room’ of passenger compartment or lavatory.
Advantages of this arrangement included better protection from draughts, now that each compartment no longer had an external door. The chief drawback was that entrances and exits were much slower, especially when a train was crowded; worse, the pushiest passengers might elbow their way on board before the slowest or most luggage-laden had a chance to get off. One such incident in 1920, involving a Birmingham football excursion, got so out of hand that carriage doors were broken off in a platform brawl. So a modified plan came into favour in mid century, with doors to a cross-passage halfway along the carriage as well as at the ends.
The standard version of this type, as developed after nationalisation, became the single most numerous design of carriage ever to run on Britain’s railways, to a total of 2,168. The last were built in 1963, and the design remained numerous even on some main-line routes out of London into the early 1990s. Borrowing from military usage, this generation of carriages was dubbed the Mark 1, as if to signal a new start. They represented the final eclipse of wood-framed construction, employing steel exclusively for underframe, body and cladding. Joinery for internal use lasted a little longer, and Mark 1s also made much use of veneered panelling, to which were affixed earnest little labels identifying the type of wood and its origin: ‘Crown Elm Great Britain’, and so on. Less obviously, the carriages were also rather under-insulated, with single-glazed windows and inadequate provision to muffle the greater levels of noise associated with all-steel construction.
A sortie to the buffet car of a train of corridor Mark 1s on a winter’s evening was an adventure in microclimates. Warmth and comfort were represented by the compartment, which (if all was well) enjoyed heating and reading lamps that could be controlled by the occupants. The compartment might be made still more private by means of sprung blinds of thick glazed fabric, which could be pulled down over the outside window and also over the tall narrow windows on the corridor side – two next to the seats, one for the window in the sideways-sliding door between. Beyond this threshold was the territory of the draughts, which seemed somehow to come from all directions at once, but with a general impetus in line with the direction of travel. A steady roar of air currents forced an entry through the gaps around the upper windows along the corridor. The draughts were checked a little where swing doors were fixed across the corridor, as when second-class gave way to first within the same carriage, but raged unhindered in the under-lit vestibules at the carriage ends. Here too could be found the narrow doors to the lavatories, not always easily identifiable in the sheer-sided panelling of the carriage wall. Now the draughts were magnified by the input from crevices around the external doors, mingled with the greater inrush through the corridor connection. This was no place to linger, with its chorus of creaks and squeaks emerging from the shapeless and squashy sides and from beneath the steel floor-plate, the point at which the restless differential motions of one carriage against the next became unsettlingly visible.
If the carriage ends were all too dark and solid, the corridors were almost the opposite. Here, overlapping reflections of illuminated compartments in the glass of the windows and corridor windows competed for the brain’s attention with the real images of the spaces themselves, and with the sharper, slightly dulled but altogether irresistible glimpses of passengers on the opposing seats presented in the mirrors fixed to the cross-walls of the compartments just ahead. Further disorientation occurred when entering a new carriage that was reversed in relation to the rest, so that the corridor switched from one side to the other – an effect like that of going next door in a mirrored pair of semi-detached houses, and a useful mnemonic and landmark for the swaying journey back to the home compartment. The speeds might be faster, the finishes and fabrics more modern, the light bulbs a little brighter, but the whole experience was in essence the same as that of the traveller on an up-to-date Edwardian train.
All gone now, in Britain at least (the compartmented carriage is still current in parts of the Continent). We are left with variants of the saloon, now stripped of the luxuries and supplements that attended Pullman travel. The single-space interior with its central gangway is so familiar, and so straightforward and logical in its alignment with the corridor connection, that it is surprising how slowly it was adopted as standard. Yet the type was as old as the twentieth century, beginning with two carriage sets built by the Great Western in 1900–1901 for its trains to South Wales. The company hoped to set a trend by providing a kitchen car from which refreshments could be brought to passengers at their seats, to be served on demountable tables. And yet nobody seemed to like the new carriages much, partly because they proved to be unusually cold in winter. There was even a report in 1920 that some passengers encountering the carriages at Paddington had left in a huff to take the rival route via Euston instead, despite
having paid in advance for – so they imagined – a reserved first-class compartment. Saloons made more headway on certain electrified suburban routes, and they had a monopoly of London’s deep Tube lines from day one, but the side-corridor carriage remained the norm for long-distance railway travel in Britain, with Pullman cars among the occasional exceptions.
Explanations based on national character are out of fashion nowadays, but during most of the twentieth century the idea that Britons were by nature more private and reserved than other races would still have found general assent. This preference for travelling in separate spaces seems to back up the theory. When less than full, a compartment was a place of promising intimacy: somewhere for friends travelling together to exchange confidences, or a neutral enclosure in which strangers might strike up conversation without the self-consciousness that comes with being overheard. The contrast with the American way continued to be remarked. Here are the musings of the hero of Sinclair Lewis’s Dodsworth (1929), on his first foray to the Old World: ‘… how strange was the British fashion of having railway compartments instead of an undivided car with a long aisle along which you could observe ankles, magazines, Rotary buttons, clerical collars, and all the details that made travelling interesting’.
By the 1930s Dodsworth would have stood a slightly better chance of enjoying the cavalcade of ankles, thanks to a new generation of carriages intended for excursion trains. On the London & North Eastern, these carriages were explicitly called ‘tourist’ stock, and were finished in apple-green-and-cream plywood panelling rather than the unpainted teak then still used for the company’s other carriages, in costly continuation of Victorian tradition. Travellers in this tourist stock may have welcomed its affinity with the cheery communality of the char-a-banc and motor-coach party. But fun was one thing, everyday travel by privacy-seeking singles and couples quite another. When the LNER set up a committee during the Second World War to consider what future carriage designs should be like, it concluded that compartment stock was ‘substantially more popular’. The Southern Railway received similar feedback from a questionnaire handed out in 1945, when it displayed a new prototype main-line coach at Waterloo and Victoria. The Southern passengers’ ideal proved to be compartment stock, with individual reading lights, and heating in the lavatories and in the corridors. Warmer corridors mattered at a time when many trains were crammed from one end to the other with standing passengers and servicemen slumped on kitbags. The people got what they wanted: all these features were provided in the new carriages the Southern began to build shortly afterwards.
Not all Southern Railway trains of the period were like this. The company then had as its chief mechanical engineer the gifted but wayward O. V. S. Bulleid, a man who liked to rethink things from first principles – sometimes successfully, sometimes less so. A small-scale example of the former is the coat hanger he designed in the 1920s for the sleeper compartments of his previous employer, the London & North Eastern. Reasoning that the average man began to undress by taking off his jacket and waistcoat, Bulleid provided a separate trouser crossbar, placed above and projecting beyond the curved support for the upper garments. Less successful ideas included the boxy, freakish experimental steam locomotive that Bulleid designed for the state railways of Ireland, where the devoutly Catholic engineer took himself after the Southern Railway lost its independent existence. His Irish engine burnt the native turf instead of imported British coal, but was destined to remain the only one of its kind.
Somewhere between turf burner and coat hanger on the scale of practicality were the two double-decked electric suburban units Bulleid designed in the latter days of the Southern. The aim was to increase rush-hour capacity without having to extend the station platforms to take longer trains. A cross-Channel precedent existed in a class of trains built in 1933 to serve the Parisian suburbs, but these were more like double-decker buses, one saloon sitting straightforwardly above the other. To allow for the more restricted British loading gauge, Bulleid tessellated together L-shaped lower compartments with upper ones of a fat T-shaped section, the crossbar of the T representing the seat level and the space above it, the stem corresponding to the leg-space provided between these seats and the (raised) floor. Access to each upper space was via a narrow staircase tucked into one side of the lower compartment, whose passengers sat with their heads below the seats of those riding above.
A success in terms of increasing seat numbers, the trains had the drawback of slow loading and unloading in the rush hour. The tight clearances meant that the windows at the upper level had to be of the non-opening kind, so the atmosphere within the smoking carriages in particular became taxing. Even so, Bulleid’s double-deckers lasted for over twenty years, grinding around the unglamorous Kentish suburbs on the Dartford loop. But no more were built; instead, British Railways quietly set about lengthening platforms and building orthodox new carriages after all.
One of Bulleid’s double-decked units at Charing Cross station, before departure on a demonstration run. The units entered normal service the following day, 2 November 1949
No less strange were Bulleid’s Tavern Cars, another initiative that appeared just after nationalisation. The concept was the all too literal one of a pub on wheels, complete with draught as well as bottled beer. Since each tavern or bar vehicle was coupled alongside a restaurant car, a similar look was imposed on both. A real pub, the Chequers Inn at Pulborough in Sussex, was reportedly Bulleid’s model. Internally, the bar compartment had a low ceiling of real oaken beams, and oak settles and benches against panelled or rough-rendered walls. Long and narrow leaded windows were set high up in the carriage sides; artificial illumination came from miniatures of the carriage-lamp type, beloved of the stereotypical suburban semi. Only horse brasses and a blazing hearth were missing from this image of olde-worlde conviviality. The hostelry look worked less well in the restaurant car, whose first-class customers sat facing each other in single rows within a timbered interior like that of a giant caravan, or – to look ahead to the motor showrooms of 1952 – the rear end of a Morris Traveller. Again, the windows were of the high-set, thin and leaded type, meant to discourage too much lingering over the tables, but unpopular with those who liked to enjoy the view while dining.
The external decoration (‘livery’ is hardly the word) was jaw-dropping. Each Tavern Car was tricked out in painted mock-brickwork and black-and-cream timbering, spliced with the standard BR colours of carmine and cream for the non-pub end. As a finishing touch, the half-timbered part displayed a pictorial name panel, according to the formula ‘At the sign of the Jolly Tar’ (or White Horse, George and Dragon, etc.).
General derision followed, mixed with aesthetic dismay at the nostalgic fakery; now that they were publicly owned, a better lead in matters of design was expected from the railways. In the House of Commons, members queued up to denounce the ‘shoddy Tudoresque monstrosity’. Tom Driberg MP read out a letter of protest to The Times, signed by the heads of national bodies including the Victoria and Albert Museum, the Royal College of Art, the Council of Industrial Design, the Architectural Association and the Institute of Contemporary Arts. The official response, delivered by the young James Callaghan as Parliamentary Secretary to the Ministry of Transport, was that ‘nobody likes these tavern cars except the public’ – for the cars were proving to be both well patronised and profitable.** The painted-on brickwork rapidly disappeared and the poky windows of the restaurant cars were soon modified, but the bar interiors managed ten years of service before reconstruction. The guardians of taste had misjudged the popular mood: Bulleid’s novelties came as a tonic at a time when catering services on the railways were still struggling to recover the standards enjoyed before the Second World War.
Olde-tyme finishes notwithstanding, Bulleid’s combination of bar or buffet with restaurant car was a prescient one, and reflected a general diversification of refreshment on the rails. The usual assumption in the earliest years was that meals would be available only to pass
engers seated within the restaurant car, as in the early Pullman dining saloons. That changed rapidly as the potential of the continuous corridor was realised, and the option was extended to the cheaper classes, without challenging the convention that the courses should always be served to passengers seated at a table. The 1890s and 1900s witnessed a sort of arms race in railway catering, as competing long-distance lines tried to outflank each other in the pleasures and amenities of travel. There could be up to four sittings on an Anglo-Scottish run, regulated by the issue of seating tickets and summoned by calls from the attendants walking up and down the train (no public address systems then). In some cases, separation was preserved by placing the kitchen compartment between dedicated first- and third-class dining carriages or compartments; or the classes could dine together, or come to separate sittings using the same carriage.
Prices were kept strikingly low; managers were commonly undecided as to whether the dining cars were there primarily to make money for the company, or to attract and retain loyal passengers. Menus were often sumptuous, although quantity and quality did not always live up to the billing. For two shillings and sixpence, the London & South Western in 1910 offered four courses at luncheon: consommé fermière purée parmentier, boiled turbot in sauce cardinal, roast sirloin with sprouts and potatoes, apple tart and Devonshire cream. Dinner, priced at a shilling higher, comprised six courses, including an entrée of chicken between the fish and meat courses and concluding with cheese. The ingenuity required to prepare and present such meals from a cramped and swaying kitchen without spillage, scalding or breakage may be imagined, and not every railway took the burden directly on itself; the LSWR subcontracted its catering to Messrs Spiers and Pond, pioneers of the railway luncheon basket. Vast complements of crockery, cutlery and glassware were required; the collector John Mander calculated that each dining train on the London, Midland & Scottish Railway needed 1,510 pieces for a full service. In terms of price, there was surprisingly little difference between the restaurant car and the hampers described in Chapter 2; and who would not prefer four kitchen-fresh courses served at table to a flimsy box containing a hunk of elderly pie, an apple and a bottle of beer?
The Railways Page 27