Use of term 'carriage' for a compartment

[Calthrop]

By 1830, "coach" was he common term for a large closed passenger vehicle. As stagecoach it was associated with the main form of long-distance public transport, which the railways would soon take over. "Carriage" was still common too, and older (being English in origin, where "coach" was borrowed from Hungarian), but by then was used more for private vehicles, so seen as higher class.

My bolding, above -- interesting (or perhaps not !) bit of trivia: Hungarian roots of the word "coach" -- from the name of the village of Kocs (approximate pronunciation "cotch", I believe), 65 km. north-west of Budapest and a little way south of the Slovakian border. This village was a prominent site of horse-drawn vehicle manufacture from the 1400s onward; whence the word for the vehicle -- English "coach", and similar-or-fairly-so equivalents in a good variety of European languages.

 

[etr221]

She knew her motorbikes too - read the short story of "the cat in the bag"

The car registration in "Have His Carcase" was not, and still is not, a valid UK one (O1 O1 O1 - although O 101 would have served the same purpose). However, she does leave a clue as to the true identity of the owner of the Austin Seven in "Unnatural Death" by giving it an "XX" registration. (Although it does seem rather careless of the owner, who had taken great care to cover her tracks in other respects)

OIO 101 would have been been valid, as one from County Kildare (who had the IO mark), but (a) they didn't issue 3 letter marks until the 1960s (when it was long out of the UK) and (b) among these, didn't use the OIO or IIO combinations.

 

[norbitonflyer]

OIO 101 would have been been valid, as one from County Kildare (who had the IO mark), but (a) they didn't issue 3 letter marks until the 1960s (when it was long out of the UK) and (b) among these, didn't use the OIO or IIO combinations.

Inded - if you allow a leading zero, which some licencing authorities did for "heavy motor vehicles" (traction engines etc) before they were absorbed into the main series, OI 0101 could have been a very early Belfast mark. (Or the owner might have added a leading zero and hoped the police wouldn't object - like modern registrations making words by making a 4 look like an A or a 6 look like a G.

O 10101 might have been issued by Birmingham if five-digit numbers had been allowed.

 

[JGurney]

The great majority of authors who write popular books are not railway enthusiasts. How they tackle episodes involving railways depends on their attitude: some will do a bit of research to get the details right,

I agree, but knowing whether or not 'carriage' was another term for a compartment would not require expertise, just some everyday experience of rail travel, or even being party to conversations where rail travel was mentioned.
Anthony Buckeridge was in his mid-40's in 1960, and had been a schoolteacher for over a decade before leaving teaching to become a full-time author. It seems unlikely that he would be unaware of the normal terms used by the public for parts of a train.

 

[WesternLancer]

There were, but the others were not of a linguistic nature.
There might be one where the train, which is from Victoria to the South Coast, is described as being loco-hauled by an "electric engine". I noticed that when first reading the book aged about 11, as I knew that by then, the mid-70's, all such services were EMUs, but I recall thinking that perhaps they had used locos 15 years earlier. I still don't know today whether SR ran any loco-hauled services into Sussex in 1961.

The next one arises when some coaches are detached at an intermediate station, and are then shunted into sidings without a staff member checking that there were no passengers still on board. This leads to two boys finding themselves marooned in the sidings. I recall being surprised by this on first reading it, as it seemed highly implausible. While I had not been around in 1961, it seemed to me even as an 11-year-old that surely someone would check coaches were empty before shunting them into sidings.
As the author, Anthony Buckeridge, generally stuck to realistic events in his fiction, rather than featuring impossibilities, this struck me as different from the rest of his work.

The last, and really unbelievable, was that when the two boys marooned in the coaches in the sidings alerted the crew of a shunting engine to their presence, the crew carried the two boys in the cab back to the nearest station and then arranged for them to complete their journey in the brake-van of a freight train going that way.

That seemed wholly unbelievable to me as an 11-year-old. It seemed to me that the boys would either be escorted out to the road and left to walk, or perhaps driven back to the station by road, not conveyed in a shunter's cab, and when they did get to the nearest station they would be put on the next passenger train, not given a ride on a freight train. I recall being quite puzzled that the normally realistic Buckeridge should include such events. However, having read here about shunter crews on lines like the Wenford branch giving enthusiasts cab rides as late as the 1980's, perhaps I was wrong and such a thing could have happened in 1961.

Pretty sure the Bullied electric locos hauled Newhaven boat trains at some point so that would be on the Brighton line. 1950s maybe.