Use of term 'carriage' for a compartment

[Mcr Warrior]

Be right in suggesting that, back in the earliest days of passenger rail transport, the dimensions of a railway carriage were likely to be very similar to the size / length / design of a typical horse drawn stagecoach of the time, and so would have had just the one compartment? Can quite see why the words "carriage", "compartment" and "coach" might then be thought to have similar meanings.


(Pic of "Experiment", an early railway carriage used for carrying passengers over the Stockton and Darlington railway almost 200 years ago.)

 

[Taunton]

A special school train to the Sussex Coast

Cousin actually returned in the 1960s from Victoria to Bexhill on the grandly-titled (in the school mag) "The School Train", for which both families made a visit up to London. Although at a youthful age, I was somewhat past the point of envisaging that the headmaster would be driving the locomotive, but was certainly anticipating an interesting special working with many hundreds of schoolchildren.

Turned out it was three of them, seated in one 4-CIG seating bay on the hourly Ore service, accompanied by a sad-faced teacher who had been sent up earlier to London to chaperone them back. Disappointment.

Another example of a novelist not understanding how trains work.

"the floor began to vibrate as the engine roared into life", (Then) a voice overhead said "Wotcher", .......his body unfroze, he was able to push himself into a sitting position, wipe the blood off his bruised face and raise his head to look up at [his rescuer]. "We'd better get out of here" she said as the train windows became obscured with steam and the train began to move out of the station".

Fine if it's a DMU, but this is the Hogwarts Express (Half Blood Prince, Chapter 8). The floor of a loco-hauled train shouldn't vibrate when it's stationary,

We're a picky lot here. This used to happen on the 4-TC sets at Weymouth, 30 miles beyond the the end of the third rail, when the Class 33 was switched in and the reciprocating air pump under your seat thumped into life. It did seem surreal. The power for it came down the train heating cables from the loco.

 

[snowball]

Characters in the series are forever popping up to the front to talk to the driver too!

Whilst the train scenes in the Potter books are full of railway howlers, I think, to be fair, that that particular one happens only once - it's Hermione who does it but I forget which book.

 

[norbitonflyer]

Whilst the train scenes in the Potter books are full of railway howlers, I think, to be fair, that that particular one happens only once - it's Hermione who does it but I forget which book.

Three times
Professor Lupin in "Prisoner of Askaban" and the trolley witch in "Philospher's Stone" - she tells the children they can find her up front with the driver - as Hermione later does.

 

[Gloster]

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, but not always understand what they found out, others will make a guess at what they think is correct, but sometimes miss by a mile, while others will barely bother.

It is a long time since I read Robert Harris’ Enigma, but in that (if I remember correctly) there was an appalling railway error around a fairly important plot point. However, unless you were a railway signalman, driver, operating manager or very well informed enthusiast, you probably wouldn’t have noticed. In a book by Robert Goddard, who has a reputation for detailed research, there is an important plot point where somebody travelling on a train from Exeter to London sees two people leave it at Westbury. Unfortunately the book is set well before the various cut-offs were built and while the GWR’s trains to the West ran the ‘Great Way Round’ via Bristol. (Again, if I remember correctly.)

Just take everything written about railway in novels with a pinch of salt. Occasionally an author, particularly a contemporary one, includes an interesting and accurate detail, but usually if it looks wrong, it probably is. Even Ian Fleming found himself contacted by a reader about errors to do with guns and later took advice from this…Major Boothroyd. Even worse, Fleming once made a mistake about something he really cared and knew about: champagne.

 

[Taunton]

Arthur Conan Doyle was no mean railway enthusiast himself, but in his various writings (including specific railway-oriented ones, such as "The Lost Special") had an inner sort of delight in putting in little errors, possibly just for his own amusement. Thus Sherlock Holmes commonly left London for his destination by the "wrong" station. Not stupidly nonsense, but maybe the next one along Euston Road.

What the author writes is just the start, the publisher has manuscript editors who go through in detail looking for inconsistencies and many other aspects. The general style of The Rev Awdry for example was set not so much by him as author, but by the books editor at the publisher.

 

[Gloster]

Arthur Conan Doyle was no mean railway enthusiast himself, but in his various writings (including specific railway-oriented ones, such as "The Lost Special") had an inner sort of delight in putting in little errors, possibly just for his own amusement. Thus Sherlock Holmes commonly left London for his destination by the "wrong" station. Not stupidly nonsense, but maybe the next one along Euston Road.

’The Lost Special’ does contain a number of railway errors, in particular the method used to hide the special would have left undisguisable traces that would have quickly given things away. In one of the Holmes story he announces to Watson the exact speed of the train that they are on, explaining that the he is able to time it because the telegraph posts ‘on this this line’ are so-and-so yards apart: oh, that life was so simple.

 

[Calthrop]

Fiction authors getting railway stuff wrong -- "the number is legion" -- this matter has been corresponded about plentifully elsewhere on this board, with my doing considerable taking-part. I'll probably be taken to task here, for being un-PC and misogynistic: but I seem to find that female fiction authors are (with a couple of honourable exceptions) particularly prone to such rail-type errors. Vindication here perhaps, for the old schoolboy meme -- "girls don't like trains, and have no interest in them, and can't understand us as regards this issue".

A thing relevant here, which has always bothered me: has a USA setting. Paullina Simons has written a number of novels, with World War II-and-aftermath US / USSR settings: found by me in the main, pretty literate and readable. One of these, though -- The Bronze Horseman -- contains what I feel to be a doozy of a railway error. The heroine has, by something of a miracle, managed to get out of Stalin's Soviet Union, and is living in the States in 1946 (as was the experience of the Russian-born author, only somewhat more than a generation later). For plot-related reasons now forgotten, heroine needs to make a quite long journey from New York to -- somewhere; novel tells of her using the AMTRAK passenger train service, to do this journey. Had me wanting to yell, "Hey, missus -- you're 25 years ahead of date -- AMTRAK not born or thought of in 1946 !"

Trying to be "sane" about this -- it makes not one iota of difference to the plot; and especially for an author (whose English, by the way, is excellent) who grew up not in the US -- and in a country to boot, where information about relatively petty American doings, can't have been easy to come by: I should in all decency, be ready to cut a considerable amount of slack -- especially about absurdly trivial details. I'd think it highly likely that in the later decades of the USSR: there was there, a clandestine equivalent of our Continental Railway Circle -- avidly (just as a hobby) collecting and circulating among selves, info about railway doings elsewhere in the world, which they weren't supposed to know anything about; imagination goes into overdrive concerning such a, putative, scene... but, no reason that young Paullina would have known about, or had the slightest interest in, such goings-on...

 

[norbitonflyer]

E Nesbit (The Railway Children) doesn't seem to make any howlers, although there is a rather casual attitude to trespass - the original BBC series and the feature film didn't address the issue at all and the ITV version (with Jenny Agutter as the mother) made light of it.

One of the worst is "The First Great Train Robbery" by John Grisham Michael Crichton. This has, within the first page:

• A driver and an "engineer" on the footplate. (Particualrly odd, as Grisham was an American, to whom a "driver" and "engineer" would be one and the same)
• Loco crew in smart red overalls.
• An hour from London Bridge the train reaches its full speed of 50mph through the Kent countryside. (In 1853 the SER boat train route did not reach the Surrey/Kent border until it had travelled 50 miles, so would have had to average 50mph (including the Redhill stop referred to in the text) to be in Kent within the hour.

Later we also have

• Rivalry between the London & Greenwich and the South Eastern - by 1853 the latter owned the former.
• Greenwich being a day's journey from London Bridge
• Ostend being in France
• The Folkestone boat train running at the same time, with the same guard, every day. (It was known as the "Tidal" for a reason, which was the undoing of Charles Dickens - the Staplehurst derailment - which one might expect a literary man to have known)

"The Holmes Affair" by Graham Moore is also shockingly bad - set in London and Switzerland in the 1890s and 1980s, but it would appear the author has never been to Europe (he has modern traffic driving on the right in London, and "weaving from lane to lane" on London streets (specifically Fulham Road, which is definitely only one lane each way), not to mention "monks" working for the (Anglican) Archbishop of Canterbury). In the Victorian era he has a character arrive at Waterloo from Limehouse, taking a cab from London to Hindhead and back in a few hours (the poor horse!) and later on visiting the Reichenbach Falls having had breakfast in Zermatt (before the Lotschberg Tunnel was built in the 1920s, that would have involved a 12 hour train journey via Brig, Lausanne, Bern and Interlaken, including two lake steamers to fill gaps in the rail network). Another character is portrayed as an innocent country girl unfamiliar with London - she lives in West Hampstead! And the Metropolitan Railway getting no nearer the docks than Aldgate. He also has people speculating that "The Queen Mother" might have died. This was in 1895, - there had been no such person since 1669 and there wouldn't be another until 1910

 

[Gloster]

E Nesbit (The Railway Children) doesn't seem to make any howlers, although there is a rather casual attitude to trespass - the original BBC series and the feature film didn't address the issue at all and the ITV version (with Jenny Agutter as the mother) made light of it.

One of the worst is "The First Great Train Robbery" by John Grisham. This has, within the first page:

• A driver and an "engineer" on the footplate. (Particualrly odd, as Grisham was an American, to whom a "driver" and "engineer" would be one and the same)
• Loco crew in smart red overalls.
• An hour from London Bridge the train reaches its full speed of 50mph through the Kent countryside. (In 1853 the SER boat train route did not reach the Surrey/Kent border until it had travelled 50 miles, so would have had to average 50mph (including the Redhill stop referred to in the text) to be in Kent within the hour.

Later we also have

• Rivalry between the London & Greenwich and the South Eastern - by 1853 the latter owned the former.
• Greenwich being a day's journey from London Bridge
• Ostend being in France
• The Folkestone boat train running at the same time, with the same guard, every day. (It was known as the "Tidal" for a reason, which was the undoing of Charles Dickens - the Staplehurst derailment - which one might expect a literary man to have known)

"The Holmes Affair" by Graham Moore is also shockingly bad - set in London and Switzerland in the 1890s and 1980s, but it would appear the author has never been to Europe (he has modern traffic driving on the right in London, and "weaving from lane to lane" on London streets (specifically Fulham Road, which is definitely only one lane each way), not to mention "monks" working for the (Anglican) Archbishop of Canterbury). In the Victorian era he has a character arrive at Waterloo from Limehouse, taking a cab from London to Hindhead and back in a few hours (the poor horse!) and later on visiting the Reichenbach Falls having had breakfast in Zermatt (before the Lotschberg Tunnel was built in the 1920s, that would have involved a 12 hour train journey via Brig, Lausanne, Bern and Interlaken, including two lake steamers to fill gaps in the rail network). Another character is portrayed as an innocent country girl unfamiliar with London - she lives in West Hampstead! And the Metropolitan Railway getting no nearer the docks than Aldgate.

The First Great Train Robbery is by Michael Crichton. It was published in the US without the ‘First’, I think. (There is a bit of confusion, in my mind if nowhere else, to do with UK and US titles and pre- and post-film editions.)

It is possible that even as late as the 1890s that a poor girl from West Hampstead might be not familiar with any but the mile or two round her home, although by then it would be rare. But if I have read the book, which is quite possible, it has passed out of my Ken.

I do remember another Holmes pastiche done by an American author that talked about a British Railways‘ office.

 

[Rescars]

Fiction authors getting railway stuff wrong -- "the number is legion" -- this matter has been corresponded about plentifully elsewhere on this board, with my doing considerable taking-part. I'll probably be taken to task here, for being un-PC and misogynistic: but I seem to find that female fiction authors are (with a couple of honourable exceptions) particularly prone to such rail-type errors. Vindication here perhaps, for the old schoolboy meme -- "girls don't like trains, and have no interest in them, and can't understand us as regards this issue".

A thing relevant here, which has always bothered me: has a USA setting. Paullina Simons has written a number of novels, with World War II-and-aftermath US / USSR settings: found by me in the main, pretty literate and readable. One of these, though -- The Bronze Horseman -- contains what I feel to be a doozy of a railway error. The heroine has, by something of a miracle, managed to get out of Stalin's Soviet Union, and is living in the States in 1946 (as was the experience of the Russian-born author, only somewhat more than a generation later). For plot-related reasons now forgotten, heroine needs to make a quite long journey from New York to -- somewhere; novel tells of her using the AMTRAK passenger train service, to do this journey. Had me wanting to yell, "Hey, missus -- you're 25 years ahead of date -- AMTRAK not born or thought of in 1946 !"

Trying to be "sane" about this -- it makes not one iota of difference to the plot; and especially for an author (whose English, by the way, is excellent) who grew up not in the US -- and in a country to boot, where information about relatively petty American doings, can't have been easy to come by: I should in all decency, be ready to cut a considerable amount of slack -- especially about absurdly trivial details. I'd think it highly likely that in the later decades of the USSR: there was there, a clandestine equivalent of our Continental Railway Society -- avidly (just as a hobby) collecting and circulating among selves, info about railway doings elsewhere in the world, which they weren't supposed to know anything about; imagination goes into overdrive concerning such a, putative, scene... but, no reason that young Paullina would have known about, or had the slightest interest in, such goings-on...

All credit to Dorothy Sayers. As she says in her Foreword to Five Red Herrings, "All the places are real places and all the trains are real trains".

 

[Mcr Warrior]

Fiction authors getting railway stuff wrong -- "the number is legion"...

Who'd have thunk it? Fiction authors making stuff up?!

 

[Calthrop]

All credit to Dorothy Sayers. As she says in her Foreword to Five Red Herrings, "All the places are real places and all the trains are real trains".

Yes -- she was on-the-ball in this matter. Also Carola Dunn in her 1920s-set Daisy Dalrymple mysteries; save for a couple of very-minor "maybes", she has an admirably good grip on this scene.

 

[norbitonflyer]

The First Great Train Robbery is by Michael Crichton..)

It is possible that even as late as the 1890s that a poor girl from West Hampstead might be not familiar with any but the mile or two round her home, although by then it would be rare.

My mistake.

The girl from West Hampstead was depicted as being from a well-to-do family, which is why the author's description of her being unfamilar with the Underground is not credible. (She is also desc ribed as taking the train to Kings Cross and joining the Underground there - the nearest GNR station to West Hampstead was - King Cross!

 

[Gloster]

Yes -- she was on-the-ball in this matter. Also Carola Dunn in her 1920s-set Daisy Dalrymple mysteries; save for a couple of very-minor "maybes", she has an admirably good grip on this scene.

Though she gets the number of railways combined to form the LNER wrong right at the beginning of one book. Which was the first I read.

 

[norbitonflyer]

All credit to Dorothy Sayers. As she says in her Foreword to Five Red Herrings, "All the places are real places and all the trains are real trains".

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)

 

[Calthrop]

Though she gets the number of railways combined to form the LNER wrong right at the beginning of one book. Which was the first I read.

Indeed -- I think we've corresponded about this "elsewhere hereon". Seeking for charity -- things must have been confusing for non-rail-nutters in 1923; and Daisy had various other things on her mind at the time, including her relationship with Alec .

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

Although 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), she does leave a clue as to the true identity of the owner of the Austin Seven i

"Unnatural Death" by giving it an "XX" registration. (Although it does seem rather careless of the owner)

Wow -- all the above is "as unknown to me, as Muscovy itself". I should perhaps muse on glasshouse-dwelling stone-throwers ...

 

[Gloster]

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

Although 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), 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)

I believe that it is only in recent years that DVLA has offered a service where they will provide a plausible registration number that was never used. In the days of Sayers et al., they had to make one up and produce ones that were entirely fictional, but all too often implausible. They had to avoid the risk of being sued by someone whose car number had been given to a murderer or other undesirable.

 

[Rescars]

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)

I believe she drove a Ner-a-Car, which was slightly exotic.

IIRC "Have His Carcass" includes some comparison between a Morgan and a Belsize-Bradshaw. You don't come across air/oil cooled V2 engines very often, either in fact or fiction!

 

[snowball]

Arthur Conan Doyle was no mean railway enthusiast himself, but in his various writings (including specific railway-oriented ones, such as "The Lost Special") had an inner sort of delight in putting in little errors, possibly just for his own amusement. Thus Sherlock Holmes commonly left London for his destination by the "wrong" station. Not stupidly nonsense, but maybe the next one along Euston Road.

My recollection is that Holmes rarely had any cases north of London!

 

[Gloster]

My recollection is that Holmes rarely had any cases north of London!

Birmingham, Cambridge, Derbyshire, Herefordshire and Norfolk are the only ones that come to mind.

 

[snowball]

Birmingham, Cambridge, Derbyshire, Herefordshire and Norfolk are the only ones that come to mind.

More than I would have thought!

I think there was a film in which he had a case in the Scottish Highlands but that was definitely not based on a story by Doyle.

 

[Gloster]

I think there was a film in which he had a case in the Scottish Highlands but that was definitely not based on a story by Doyle.

Presumably The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes with Robert Stephens. All hokum, but look at all the times he turned up in the USA.

 

[snowball]

Presumably The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes with Robert Stephens. All hokum, but look at all the times he turned up in the USA.

I remembered that one just now and came back to my computer to see if anyone had posted about it. But I was originally thinking of an older one. After some web investigation I think it was The House of Fear (1945).

I see from Wikipedia that another one, Terror by Night (1946), is set on a train to Scotland, bringing us back a bit nearer to the topic.

 

[Rescars]

Arthur Conan Doyle was no mean railway enthusiast himself, but in his various writings (including specific railway-oriented ones, such as "The Lost Special") had an inner sort of delight in putting in little errors, possibly just for his own amusement. Thus Sherlock Holmes commonly left London for his destination by the "wrong" station. Not stupidly nonsense, but maybe the next one along Euston Road.

In "The Bruce Partington Plans" the action involves what is now the Circle line. I am sure someone on the Forum can comment on the accuracy of the description of operating practices during the steam era.

 

[norbitonflyer]

I believe she drove a Ner-a-Car, which was slightly exotic.

[EDIT} I assume you mean Sayers herself, not one of her characters. A "Ner-a-Car" was a sort of recumbent motorcycle - marketed as suitable for women as well as men, as a conventional motorcycle was difficult to mount if wearing a skirt.
In "Unnatural Death" there was a Renault - at tghe time the most common imported make but, like any foreign car, nevertheless slightly exotic, if only because, for its size, road tax would be higher - British cars were designed around the RAC horsepower formula used to calculate Britsh road tax - as this was based on the bore, but not the stroke, of the cylinders, the engines had very long narrow cylinders. French cars were designed around a different formula (the Cheval Vapeur - CV). Neither formula bore much relation to the actual power outout.

IIRC "Have His Carcass" includes some comparison between a Morgan and a Belsize-Bradshaw. You don't come across air/oil cooled V2 engines very often, either in fact or fiction!

The fact that the character had insisted on hiring a Morgan, which had a 2-stroke engine, was an important clue.

In "The Bruce Partington Plans" the action involves what is now the Circle line. I am sure someone on the Forum can comment on the accuracy of the description of operating practices during the steam era.

The railway geography is certainly accurate. Conan Doyle himself had remarked on the presence of buildings backing directly onto the tracks at the Brompton triangle, and the reason the body was found where it was is also consistent.

 

[Ken H]

Yes! And there's also something similar in Thailand.

It was used for trams in Leeds. They had some 8 wheeled bogie trams for the reserved track to Middleton so were known as Middleton Bogies?

 

[Ken H]

I believe the use of carriage in the UK comes from the mounting of a horse drawn vehicle on a flat car attached to a passenger train.
The use of 'car' seems to have been brought from the US when Yerkes bought into the underground railways. Less sure how 'car' got into main line use for multiple units.
As an aside, 'car' was an expression for a bus with many pre deregulation bus companies having 'road car' in their company name.(West Yorkshire, North Western, Lincolnshire). But 'Automobile' was also used. West Riding and Darlington based United.

 

[stuving]

I believe the use of carriage in the UK comes from the mounting of a horse drawn vehicle on a flat car attached to a passenger train.

While that did happen, it was pretty rare and I think the linguistic question of "coach" and "carriage" is a lot simpler.

By 1830, "coach" was the 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.

When the railway engineers wanted to carry passengers they took the kind of wagon chassis they already had and looked for someone to build some bodywork. The tradesmen that did that were coach-builders, and to start with they put their usual coach bodies side by side on a chassis. Soon they switched to a single structure for each chassis, but the detailing remained that of separate coach bodies for each compartment.

If you search for images with "railway carriage 1830" you get loads of copyrighted ones (mostly Alamy's!), but this later copy (from Wikimedia) is public domain and shows the stylised upward curve at each end of each "coach" body (originally giving clearance for the axles).

I don't think the class distinction of coach=basic and carriage=posh was strongly marked in railway usage, though of course "coach" is still used that way in American trains and 'planes. However, traditional coach-building was kept up for first class for some time, and you can see why the kind of traditional (and older) passenger in first class would still be calling what they sat in a "carriage". Indeed, if they were always escorted on and off and never had to find their own way they might not even know how many of these coach or carriage bodies shared a chassis.

 

[Rescars]

I believe the use of carriage in the UK comes from the mounting of a horse drawn vehicle on a flat car attached to a passenger train.
The use of 'car' seems to have been brought from the US when Yerkes bought into the underground railways. Less sure how 'car' got into main line use for multiple units.
As an aside, 'car' was an expression for a bus with many pre deregulation bus companies having 'road car' in their company name.(West Yorkshire, North Western, Lincolnshire). But 'Automobile' was also used. West Riding and Darlington based United.

Weren't Pullmans always cars? I think the Pullman Car Co was established in the UK in the 1880s. Aside from units, on the main line cars were normally special items of coaching stock, not just Pullman, but also observation, club, sleeping, buffet, griddle, dining etc. Though if you wanted to eat something and fancied a full meal in the diner, when you got there you might find it cooked in a kitchen van and served in a carriage known to the staff as the saloon, a term otherwise reserved just for royalty, directors, senior managers and the very wealthy. All very tricky for the unanoraked!