Slip Coaches

[sandwhich]

Can anybody remember slip coaches that I believe were used on the Great Western until around 1960 when the practice was abandoned. How the slip was actually done I do not know, but a Guard would "guide" the said coach into a platform where the handbrake would be applied, passengers would leave the train and then the station pilot would remove the coach for attachment to a service in the opposite direction. With train services running that much faster there was no longer any need for this type of working. Todays Health & Safety people would have a fit at all of this.

[sandwhich]

I should have added would this type of working have been used on the East Coast at anytime in the far and distant past.

[Mickey]

Deleted

[drmditch]

I believe that slip coaches were used on the ex-GCR and ex-GER until the mid-30's, but I haven't checked the references yet. At some time (I think about 1936?) there was a collision between a slipped coach and the train it should have slipped from, and after that the use of slipped coaches was eliminated on the LNER.

I'm sure that someone on here can give you chapter and verse. I'll look it up when I can.

[Mickey]

Deleted

[JASd17]

The last slip was made on the Western Region in September 1960 at Bicester.

Slipping was discontinued on the former GC lines of the LNER in February 1936, following an accident.
I am not sure, but it may have continued on the ex-GER section until the beginning of WWII.

John

[Bill Bedford]

Can anybody remember slip coaches that I believe were used on the Great Western until around 1960 when the practice was abandoned. How the slip was actually done I do not know, but a Guard would "guide" the said coach into a platform where the handbrake would be applied, passengers would leave the train and then the station pilot would remove the coach for attachment to a service in the opposite direction.

Slip coaches invariably had extra vacuum tanks so that the guard was able to control the coach(es) with the standard automatic brake.

I have a photo of a GNR 12 wheeled, double ended slip coach but have no info on where that was used.

[PaulG]

A number of articles and photographs on slip carriage workings have appeared in the Great Eastern Society Journal, in particular a comprehensive illustrated article by the late Bernard Walsh published in Journal 82 April 1995, from which I've extracted the following:

"Slip carriage working services formed an important and distinctive part of GER train operating, the practice of detaching loaded passenger carriages from a moving train can be traced back to the London & Blackwall Railway albeit not in the real meaning of "slip carriage".

The first slip carriages were introduced by the London Brighton and South Coast Railway in February 1858 and on the GWR in November 1858. For a short period c1885 the Great Northern Railway had the greatest number of slip carriages.

The GER first used slip carriages in 1872 and from the 1890s second only to the GWR in the number of slip services, in the order of 19 slips per day, including four at Tottenham, four at Colchester and two each at Broxbourne, Audley End, Brentwood and Chelmsford and one each at Bishop's Stortford and Marks Tey.

The only reported accident to a GER slip was at Marks Tey and an article on the accident appears in GERS Journal 64.

On the GER the maximum number of carriages in a slip portion was five.

It appears it was the cost of providing slip carriages, which caused the reduction after WW1 (lack of manpower, rise in wages etc) and the last slip on the former GER was on Friday 30 June 1939, due to WW2."

The GWR was the only company to reintroduce slip carriage workings after WW2 running until Friday 9th September 1960."

Paul

[JASd17]

Paul many thanks for the extra information.

One interesting point is the date on which the GE section slip coaches finished. Presumably there were no slips timetabled over the weekend.

The LNER summer 1939 timetables started on Monday 3rd July. I wonder if the looming conflict was the reason the slips were finished? The emergency timetables were a few weeks ahead.

John

[drmditch]

According TO C J Allen's 'Great Eastern Railway', the last of the GE slip workings to survive was at Marks Tey off the 4:57pm Clacton train from Liverpool St, 'for which, between the wars, was built the only bogie corridor slip coach that ever operated over GER metals.'

[PaulG]

According TO C J Allen's 'Great Eastern Railway', the last of the GE slip workings to survive was at Marks Tey off the 4:57pm Clacton train from Liverpool St, 'for which, between the wars, was built the only bogie corridor slip coach that ever operated over GER metals.'

drmditch

CJ Allen's book must be read with "care" ;

".................the THREE bogie slip carriages used for the Marks Tey slip were all in good condition after WW2 and not withdrawn until 1954/5, so the slip service could have been reintroduced had the LNER management so wished."

Paul

[drmditch]

Thank you Paul. I have been suspicious of Mr Allen for a while. There are several inaccuracies in his 'Great Eastern' book that I recognised, and I suspect there are some in his LNER history as well. I suspect he had his own reasons, even though he worked for the company.

[manna]

G'Day Gents

Well, you learn something every day, I always thought that slip coaches were used singularly, I never even contemplated that they were used together, seeing five being 'dropped' off the back of an express, would have been a sight.

PS, yes I had misread the quote, it was '5 services' not 5 slip coaches, pity.

manna

[john coffin]

I would suggest you have misread the idea. It is more likely that a train had 5 slip carriages and they would have been dropped off at 5 separate stations, Rather than a single drop of 5 carriages.

The GNR started using slip carriages very quickly, and indeed the 10.00 Scotchman had one for dropping off at Doncaster for a long time. One of the more difficult things to discover is how the coaches, most of which went from Kings Cross in traffic, got back there. IE they were down train items. We are still trying to understand whether they were moved as traffic carriers, or empty trains.

Actually, although the technology might have seemed scary, it was really quite safe, and few accidents are recorded, certainly on the GNR, arriving at the stations. They had their own breaking system which was separate from that on the on goinig train.

Paul

[Jades]

Mad as slip coaches may seem now, one of George Hudson's many companies had a slip train in regular operation. I can't put my hand on the source at the moment, but the situation was that the train was intended to cross from Hudson's North-South line to join another company's Westbound line. The lack of an actual curve from south to west, the junction having originally been a curve onto the westbound line from the North which Hudson had joined from the South, was no obstacle to The Railway King.

What his staff came up with was simple, practical, and probably a lot cheaper than the boring option of just building another curve. The westbound train would approach from the south, and on the approach to the junction the locomotive would be uncoupled and accelerate away until it had just passed the junction. It would then go down the curve and westward until clear of the junction and wait for the still moving train to be brought to a halt on the north side of the junction. Once that had happened, the locomotive coupled back up to the train and Went West.

The return journey was comparatively boring as the curve had a loop so they drew the train into it, ran round and carefully propelled the train northwards past the junction and then went south.

This state of affairs lasted for a few years until the NER absorbed the companies in question and made the junction triangular by adding the south-west curve.