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All material Copyright © Mike Smith 2003 unless otherwise credited
Lighting & Heating of Railway Vehicles
On the British railways enclosed passenger stock and some goods vans
were fitted with oil lamps from about 1810 up to the 1840's, after that gas
lighting was brought in. Oil lamps did not disappear however, in 1930 there
were over five hundred oil lit coaches on the GWR, the LMSR had more than seven
hundred, the SR had over a thousand and the LNER had nearly two thousand. Gas
lighting used standard 'town gas' (coal gas from a conventional gas works) or,
after 1871, 'producer gas' made by passing air over hot coke. Water gas was a
variation on this made by heating coke and then blowing super-heated steam
through it (see Volume 2, Appendix ___ Fuels; Gas).
Gas lighting on
railway stock usually involved iron gas cylinders slung under the vehicles,
however there were variations; the Altrincham & Manchester South Junction
Railway used a leather bellows in the guards compartment which was re-filled at
stations along the route and the Lancashire & Yorkshire Railway initially
used a small coal-gas generator and storage tank mounted in the guard's van at
the rear of the train. The gas lights used were initially simple open tubes
with a flame coming out of them and gave a very poor light. The 'gas mantle' (a
small heat-proof cloth bag mounted on the end of the pipe which heats up and
glows brightly) was not invented until 1885 but this produced a greatly
improved light.
By the turn of the century electric dynamos and
batteries were available, the batteries could be slung under the coach and
topped up by a dynamo which used a belt-drive from the axles. The cost of a gas
installation was lower than for the battery and dynamo, and with the gas mantle
the light produced was nearly as bright, so gas lighting remained popular on
non-passenger vehicles. Gas also remained in use for cookers in restaurant cars
and the LMS continued building gas lit dining cars into the early 1930's. As
with everything on the railway the change took time to complete and in 1930
only the SR had more electrically lit coaches than gas but this was in part
because of their extensive use of electric traction, A few gas-lit coaches
survived on remote outposts of British Railways until about 1961.
Tubular metal 'foot warmers' were a feature of railway travel from the
later nineteenth century up to the 1920's. These used a chemical reaction to
generate heat and were activated by a railway porter shaking them vigorously
(reputedly the origin of the term 'breaking the ice' as it disrupted the
compartment enough for the reserved British passengers to start talking to each
other). They remained in use on the Isle of Man into the 1940's. The first
properly heated coached in Britain were the Pullman coaches bought by the
Midland Railway in the 1870's but the idea did not catch on for some years.
Steam heating of passenger rolling stock supplied by the locomotive was
patented in the 1850's but only appeared on British built coaches in the 1880's
(after some unsuccessful experiments using hot water supplied from the engine).
Steam heat was not used for goods stock until the advent of the specialised
Banana Van and some Fruit vans in the early twentieth century.