Inside one of the Midland Railway’s Pullman sleeping cars, from The Graphic, 1874
One of the tasks of these Pullman attendants was to enforce the prohibition on smoking in the berths. Portable reading lamps were banned too. These regulations failed to prevent the destruction by fire of the Midland’s sleeper Enterprise one night in October 1882, en route from St Pancras to Glasgow. The communication cord failed to operate and the engine steamed ahead regardless as the vehicle filled with flames and smoke. Relief came only when a signalman noticed the fire as the train passed and telegraphed a warning ahead. The attendant and three of the passengers escaped, the latter in their nightclothes (which suggests that changing for bed was the custom, at least among male Pullman travellers). When the sleeping car had cooled, the charred remains of a fourth passenger, a Dr John Arthur of Aberdeen, were found inside.
At the inquest the young doctor was described by witnesses as having seemed ‘sleepy or gloomy’, or else drunk, at earlier stages that evening. After lying down in his berth he had produced a cigar, but the attendant had plucked it from his mouth and snapped the thing in two. Did the doctor then bide his time before lighting up in secret once the curtains were drawn, only to fall into a slumber and set the bedding fatally ablaze? It was plausible.
Then it emerged that Dr Arthur had recently begun dosing himself with chloral in order to sleep, after a bout of tropical dysentery had spoiled his health. When the indignity with the cigar occurred he was already close to nodding off, for the attendant had had to pull off his boots for him. The same attendant also reported that one of the surviving passengers had been detected using an oil-fuelled reading lamp – a much more hazardous article than the usual candle-lit kind – which was ‘fixed by two hooks to the curtain’ inside his berth. The man with the lamp denied having caused the blaze, blaming the stove in the attendant’s cubicle instead. The flames had begun at the opposite end of the carriage, however, and the jury declared the lamp and its owner to be the likely culprits. With so many potential sources of fire around, going to bed on a moving train suddenly seemed less appealing.
The travelling public did not have to wait long for an alternative setup, for Pullman’s type of convertible sleeper was not destined for a protracted life in Britain. On the Continent, as in America, it was different: many journeys were so lengthy that it made sense to install beds in such a way that they could be transformed into seats for daytime use. Few British journeys lasted long enough to make this dual-use type worthwhile. Instead, the home-grown sleeper followed the corridor-compartment model – or, to put it another way, they resembled a long hotel wing with little bedrooms opening off one side of a corridor. Rather than lying along the main axis of the carriage, the traveller slept crosswise to the direction of travel, feet towards the compartment window.
The new type appeared first in the 1890s, on the Great Western and on the East Coast route, and was soon imitated on other lines. Berths might be single or double. The double ones were not necessarily meant for couples; this was an age when strangers were still expected to share a bedroom at inns, and railways were no different. A compartment for the attendant was generally included, and this was bedless. Its occupant sat up all night, to see that all was well and to provide refreshments to his passengers when they awoke. Another common feature was a smoking compartment, so that the sleeping spaces could be kept free of tobacco fumes and perilous smoulderings. By Edwardian times bedding was provided, and some sleeping cars had washbasins in the compartments. Those constructed in 1907–8 for the London & South Western’s Plymouth boat trains uniquely had brass bedsteads of domestic type, bedknobs and all.
All these vehicles were first-class only. Third-class passengers had to manage with sleeping upright or stretching out on the seats, as they had always done. The pros and cons of extending sleeper services to all classes were discussed by the joint committees for the West Coast and East Coast routes in the 1900s, but each decided not to pursue the idea because of the anticipated loss of custom to the cheaper berths. Later historians have questioned how far even the first-class service can truly have run at a profit. Edwardian passengers paid a standard supplement of five shillings for the use of a sleeper, the equivalent of the first-class fare for a mere thirty-mile journey. What a truly commercial rate might have looked like is suggested by the charge levied on the sleeping cars between Paris and Marseille, which was about twenty-four times as much. The disparity suggests that British sleeper trains were provided from a commitment to quality of service, for reasons of prestige and also – on the key routes to Scotland, at least – because not to have offered them would have lost a considerable share of traffic to the competition. For the passenger, it was a very good deal; the railways shouldered much of the expense of laying on these heavy, costly vehicles, which generated relatively few fares and which could by definition be used only once every twenty-four hours.
None of this finally prevented the extension of the service to third class, which happened in 1928 by mutual agreement on three of the four main British companies (the fourth, the Southern Railway, by then had no sleeping carriages of its own). There was a much greater gulf between the classes in these new carriages than in those for daytime use. Each compartment had four berths, arranged like pairs of bunks. In some early batches the lower beds were convertible to seats for daytime use, when the upper bunks were folded away: a version of the couchette type, as may still be encountered on the Continent. But this arrangement quickly fell from favour, and later deliveries of third-class sleeper were equipped with beds and beds only.
If the model for the first-class sleeper was the hotel or inn, the thirds had something of the air of a youth hostel (by coincidence, the Youth Hostel Association was founded around the same time, in 1930). The supplements were very much less, at not much more than a third of the first-class rate. Sheets and blankets were not included, but a pillow and a rug could be had on payment of an extra charge. There were no washing facilities in the sleeping spaces, only at the carriage ends. Some compartments on the Great Western lacked doors to the corridor. On the LNER, used soap tablets from first-class sleepers were given new lives in third-class lavatory compartments. Some of these reach-me-down soaps may previously have been rubbed over the bodies of passengers using the shower booths that were provided in the company’s new first-class sleeping cars of the 1930s.
This was clearly no way to market the sleeper service to the aspirational traveller of the 1950s. Around the start of Queen Elizabeth’s reign, the railways therefore began to provide bedding for both classes. When BR introduced its own standard design of second-class sleeping car – in 1957, just after third class was formally upgraded – they had dual berths with proper beds, and washbasins too. Single berths remained a first-class privilege; The Times’s man noted approvingly ‘the air of many individual privacies impregnably secured’ on a night journey to Inverness in 1956. Other distinctions then still current included a drugget that could be taken from its rack and placed on the floor, and the grandiose display of a passenger list at the carriage door, as if in imitation of an ocean liner (‘Two MPs, a peer, a professor, several men with efficient-sounding Scottish names, and a lady with a romantic-sounding French one.’) The proportion of listable to non-listable passengers in this period is suggested by the total number of berths within the 380 Mark 1 sleeping cars built for the national network: 1,728 first class, 4,884 second.
Press advertisement for Motorail, 1983
These numbers are a sign of healthy demand in the post-war years. Devon, Cornwall and the major Scottish cities were all connected with London by sleeper, as were many of the ports on the west coast of Britain from which sailings were made to Ireland. Northern English cities such as Manchester, Liverpool and Newcastle were also regarded as sufficiently remote from London to justify sleeping all the way there. Like certain daytime trains, many sleeper services divided into smaller portions for different destinations on the journey down and were reassembled on the
return journey. On arrival, passengers were allowed to remain in their berths until a reasonable hour, to allow a full night’s sleep. Likewise, berths could be taken and sleep achieved long before the moment of departure on the return journey, so that any thumps and jerks sustained when the carriages were recoupled might pass unnoticed.
These were also the years in which the railways rediscovered the market for transporting passengers along with their road vehicles. Many of these trains likewise ran overnight, and included sleeping cars as well as the necessary flat wagons or vans for the motors. The first of this new wave of trains was a London-to-Perth service in 1955. In 1966 the service was given a smart new name – ‘Motorail’ – and a new London base, at the under-used station at Kensington Olympia. Cross-country Motorail trains ran too. Even on daytime runs the service was far from cheap, but it had an obvious attraction in the years before the motorway system was ready. It was heavily promoted by BR, with images of Austin Maxis and Vauxhall Vivas trundling out of covered railway vans or speeding into the sunset on flat wagons coupled behind their occupants’ carriages. With some success, too: annual loadings around 1970 stood at some 100,000 vehicles.
By the late 1970s the sleeping cars were looking tired. As an interim measure the interiors were updated, with new finishes and furnishings in restful shades of blue. By tradition, the fixtures included an endearing little peg and wall-mounted pad by the bed-head, so that passengers could hang up their watches for easy consultation during the night. Meanwhile the Mark 3 version of the sleeping car was awaited, production of which began in 1981.
This new generation was delayed by a redesign in response to a terrible accident to a West Country sleeper train three years previously. Eleven passengers died in their beds, overcome by fumes from a fire that had started in the corridor. The conflagration began after plastic bags full of dirty bedding were piled up against an electric heater, the carriage having been recently converted from the old (and, in this context, safer) method of heating by piped steam. Air circulating through the corridor was directed into the compartments, whose occupants stood little chance against the silent entry of smoke and carbon monoxide in the small hours of the morning. To prevent the recurrence of such horrors, the new sleeping cars used fire-retardant materials and advanced smoke-alarm systems. They were also fully air-conditioned, putting an end to the hard choice between stuffiness and the roaring, sleep-defying draughts of an open window in a train travelling at speed. The convention that every compartment should have a chamber pot, tucked away within the base of the washbasin, was quietly abandoned. Another change was that the compartments provided for first- and second-class travellers were physically identical. Each had two berths; payment of a first-class fare secured solitary occupation, the upper bunk being folded away out of use and its demountable access ladder removed. So the classes converged further.
The market for sleeper trains had contracted by the 1970s; just 210 sleeping cars were thought sufficient to replace the 1950s versions. Even this number proved excessive. Shrinking demand for Motorail services resulted in drastic cuts in 1982, when the facilities at Kensington were closed and the network scaled back to a few routes out of London. Ordinary sleeper traffic suffered as daytime express trains ran ever faster, making it easier to get a day’s business or visiting done and still be back in good time to sleep at home. Air travel nibbled away at what was left. Sleeping cars to Wales ceased, as business with the Irish ferries dwindled. Losses of other routes followed as privatisation loomed in the 1990s and unprofitable services came under scrutiny. BR found itself with sidings full of sleeping cars that were barely twenty years old, for which there was no obvious use. The lease of ten of them to Danish State Railways in 1988 was a modest but unrepeated coup. Preserved railways queued to pick over the rest, their purchases eventually accounting for nearly one in five of the fleet. These were not acquired to run nocturnally up and down the railways’ own short lines, but for stationary use as hostels for visiting volunteers.
What remains on the privatised network is, by past standards, not much. One sleeper train per night goes from London Paddington down to Penzance (the Night Riviera), and two head from London Euston into Scotland (both called the Caledonian Sleeper). The earlier of these Caledonian departures divides into three on arrival at Edinburgh, for onward travel to Aberdeen, to Inverness, and to Fort William, which receives just two carriages. The second Scottish train serves Glasgow and Edinburgh only, splitting in two after crossing the border. In the middle of the night, each of these Caledonian trains passes its counterpart making its way up to London. The Cornish service is the first to arrive in the capital, the Highland one the last (currently at 7.47 a.m., after a journey of eleven hours). Each train also includes ordinary saloon coaches, for those prepared to sit up all night in exchange for a lower fare. Apart from the subdivisions within Scotland, sleeping cars are no longer uncoupled and dropped off at stations along the way, to allow their occupants to continue their slumbers. Plymouth used to be one such stop; now, anyone using the Night Riviera to reach that city must be prepared to get off by 5.43 a.m., or be carried off to Cornwall.
The Cornish and Scottish services have both been periodically threatened, whereupon local MPs, regular users and lovers of the railways in general rise up in well-rehearsed protest, pointing out the wider value of the sleepers to the regions and communities served. It helps that the trains become stopping services as they get further from London, so that modest places such as Ardlui, Inverkeithing and Liskeard all benefit from a direct nightly connection to the capital. On the other side of the equation, the subsidies involved are embarrassingly large. In 2011 it was calculated that each departure of a Caledonian sleeper was underwritten by the taxpayer to the sum of £17,000, out of an annual grant to the service of £21 million. At the close of that year, with the end of the operating franchise period not far off, there was ominous talk of killing off one or other of the Scottish services. Both Westminster and the Scottish government then pledged £50 million each to enhance the future of the service, which was relaunched as a separate franchise in 2015. The Westminster grant was offered first, on condition that matching funds were forthcoming from Holyrood.
This sort of politicking has so far worked to the advantage of the sleepers, which are promised an operational future up to 2029. The victor in the franchise contest held in 2013–14 was the outsourcing company Serco, which is to introduce seventy-two new sleeper carriages with both standard and business-class compartments, the latter with en suite showers and toilets. So distinctions of class are to return in force, reversing sixty years of egalitarian convergence in this particular niche of the transport system. According to Transport Scotland, the service ‘will creatively reflect the attributes that visitors say best describe Scotland: a dramatic, human and enduring place’. The carriages that are to embody these Scottish qualities will be built for lease to Serco by the Spanish company CAF, for introduction in 2018. (With a nod to the Scottish tradition of respect for the working man and the engineer, let it be recorded here that the old Mark 3 sleeping cars were designed and built in British Rail’s workshops at Derby.)
A similar entanglement of transport and politics spun the saga of the Nightstar sleeper trains, one of the strangest and least-known tales from the network in recent decades. The story began in the mid 1980s, when plans for the Channel Tunnel services were being formulated. Support for the tunnel in Britain was tempered by suspicions beyond London and the south-east that this was a costly vanity project which would bring little benefit to the country at large. Reassurance came in the form of promises to Parliament that international trains would run throughout the country, as well as to Waterloo. Sufficient new trains were ordered to allow for daytime services, and a new service depot was established at Manchester Piccadilly, where the main building was lettered with the hopeful words LE EUROSTAR HABITE ICI. But the long distances involved also meant that some cross-Channel trains would have to run through the night, which is where
the Nightstars came in. Besides overnight services from London, trains were to run from all three British nations, with Swansea, Glasgow, Manchester and Plymouth as their starting points, to destinations in France, Holland, Belgium and Germany. Each was to include day saloons as well as sleeping cars, to allow seated travel during waking hours. Catering cars were included too. Work began to build the 139 vehicles that would be needed.
None of this took account of the competition. Just as the bodyshells of the carriages were taking shape, the first low-cost airlines began their remorseless ascent across Europe. What had always been a hazily optimistic business model for the Nightstars and provincial Eurostars now lay in shreds, and the project was halted in 1997. Formal abandonment followed two years later.
In a rerun of the APT débacle, Britain’s railways now found themselves with lots of costly new rolling stock, built or half-built, for which there was no obvious use. To protect them against taggers and pilferers, the carriages were moved from the workshops in Birmingham to secure storage at the Ministry of Defence depot at Kineton in Warwickshire, where they made odd companions for the armed forces’ main munitions training school. What was to be done with them all? The obvious answer was to find a home for the trains with one of the operating companies into which the national system had been split – except that the carriages were so heavy, so crammed with current-hungry electrics and safety features needed to qualify for running under the Channel, and altogether so difficult to make compatible with existing stock, that no one wanted them. Meanwhile the Nightstar case became another skirmish in the long battle over public versus private funding for the tunnel route itself, the costs of which had consistently overrun. An exasperated John Prescott, then Deputy Prime Minster, told the House of Commons in 1998: ‘Even this week I was asked to find £100 million to pay for specially designed sleeper trains which do not work, have never worked, and are now lying idle in a field.’ The best that could be done was for the manufacturers to undertake to buy them back, on condition that a new owner could be found.
The Railways Page 31