Bored schoolboys travelling on British Rail’s Southern Electric lines in the Seventies – I was one of them – could pass the time by beating the carriage seats, so that suffocating clouds of dust rose into the air.

This substance had its own peculiar railway smell, heavy with brake dust and tobacco-smoke particles. Our pummelling adolescent fists bounced back satisfyingly from the sprung seats and rough moquette fabric.

Sprung seats of this kind were already outmoded by then. Passengers in newer trains such as the InterCity 125 sat on synthetic foam cushions, and mostly still do. Run the clock back the other way, however, and the Southern carriages begin to look distinctly luxurious, as I discovered when I came to research my book, The Railways.

In early Victorian times it was still common for second and third-class travellers to sit on plain wooden benches, just as they would have done in church, chapel or alehouse. Worse, they might find themselves exposed to the open skies in roofless carriages, or even adapted cattle trucks.

A table in a London and North Eastern Railway dining car in the 1930s

How the passenger experience improved from this early plight is a long story. Better carriages became an obvious lure as the network grew, so that different companies began competing for traffic to the same places. State regulation also had a great impact: the Railway Regulation Act of 1844 introduced cheap trains with basic protection from the weather on new routes.

Oil was preferred for early carriage lamps, slowly superseded from the 1860s by gas, then by electricity. Both oil and gas were perilous presences in an accident, when every wooden-bodied carriage became a potential bonfire. Gas was a lethal factor in the Quintinshill collision in 1915, Britain’s worst railway disaster: more than 200 travelling soldiers died in the resulting inferno. Even so, one-tenth of the carriages inherited by British Railways at nationalisation in 1948 were still lit by gas lamps.

Heating was a late arrival. From the 1850s there were foot-warmers, flat metal tins filled with hot water and placed on the carriage floor – and even these were limited initially to first class. Later it was found that acetate solution gave out more heat than plain water.

Even so, the foot-warmer was still a feeble defence against extreme cold. As Punch put it, “Alas! thou art a faithless friend,/ Thy warmth was but dissimulation;/ Thy tepid glow is at an end,/ And I am nowhere near my station!” Steam heating, piped from the locomotive, came to the rescue.

By the 1910s this was normal on long-distance winter trains. The method even outlived the demise of steam haulage: as late as the Eighties, carriages were heated by steam piped from a boiler within the diesel locomotive. Some will remember the wisps of steam between the carriages; the mysterious dripping down below.

Early trains had no continuous brakes; the driver on the engine and the guard in his van applied their brakes separately, doing their best to work together. The railways eventually adopted a fail-safe system by which every carriage had brakes. These were held clear of the wheels by vacuum or air pressure, engaging automatically if some mishap severed the brake pipe.

As late as the Eighties, steam heated the carriages

Old-fashioned usage still calls the passenger brake a “communication cord”, relic of the time when the installation sent an alarm signal to the driver or guard to stop the train.

On the North Eastern Railway, a rope strung between the carriages could be jerked to ring a bell in the guard’s van and bang a gong within the hearing – it was hoped – of the driver.

Moving through the train to give the alarm was not an option: all but a handful of Victorian carriages were made up of self-contained compartments. Internal corridors came later, made necessary by the advent of lavatories on long-distance trains. Gangway connections between carriages came next, encouraged by the arrival of the dining car.

The last carriages of the isolated compartment-type ran in the early Eighties. Their replacements, open saloons, are steadier, better lit. They provide fewer seats and more space for standing. Jammed upright on a crowded rush-hour service, a few older passengers may yet recall with a pang those long‑vanished sprung seats, and that dusty railway smell.

Simon Bradley will be talking about The Railways at the Hay Winter Weekend on November 28

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