Articulated Passenger Carriages.

In a recent paper delivered to a Home railway audience, Mr. H. N. Gresley, Chief Mechanical Engineer of the London and North Eastern line, reviewed in able fashion, recent developments in rolling stock construction.

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The employment of steel in place of wood was named by Mr. Gresley as an outstanding development in modern rolling-stock construction. Two methods of building steel carriage bodies in Britain were outlined. In the first, the vertical members or pillars, the roof supports and the longitudinal rails are all riveted together and to the underframe, forming a skeleton, to which the outside pannelling is riveted. The second, and more favoured arrangement, is known as the unit method. The roof, ends and sides are each built up separately on jigs or frames, and the whole of the panelling attached. The sides and ends are erected completely on the underframe, and on top of these the whole roof, built as a separate unit, is lowered. This unit method of construction works out relatively cheap when a number of vehicles are being turned out to a single pattern.

A feature of L. & N.E.R. practice is the employment of articulated passenger carriages, and it is interesting to learn that, at the outset, the introduction of the articulated carriage arose through the fact that the passenger carriage stock of the line included a number of six-wheeled vehicles which had become very bad riders. As they were built throughout of teak, and in splendid condition, it would have been a costly affair to have scrapped these bad-riders and replaced them by entirely new stock. To meet the situation, Mr. Gresley conceived the idea of joining two of these carriages together with a flexible connection and putting a bogie under the junction point. The articulated passenger carriage thus had its birth, and to-day forms the entire make-up of a no less famous train than the “Flying Scotsman.”