Texten ur boken (Historiskt material)

av Ola Ahlström, Saturday, May 04, 2019, 16:41 (1790 dagar sedan) @ Christer Brimalm

Skrev av texten ur boken från 1949

”That with which we are presently concerned, however, is the revival in the sixties of the corridor train idea. In 1866, Chubb and Fry endeavoured to exploit a patent for a central corridor running throughout each train. Between the carriages there where to be hinged fallplates accessible by glazed-topp doors and with side-chains in lieu of handrails. The locomotive was to have a corridor tender. Chubb ab Fry´s estimate of the cost of converting existing stock was £12 for each vehicle. No provision was made for any convenience beyond that of communication itself. The arrangement was not taken up in Great Britain, but it achieved considerable popularity in Sweden, which country purchased large number of passenger carriages from British firms in the sixties and seventies. Here is shown a four-wheel first class of the Bergslagen Railway, built by the Ashbury Railway Carriage and Iron Company, equipped with a slight modification of the original Chubb and Fry arrangement, the compartments being enclosed except where the gangway passed through at one side. The carriage, now preserved, is reputed to have been built in 1873, which was late for a three-compartment body. Swedish railways, however, favoured short coaches for some years. Unusual features of theis Bergslagen vehicle, for a British-built carriage, are the small 3 ft wheels, the high droplights, and the placing of the ventilator hoods over the quarterlights only. The Swedish State Railways adopted gangways in 1872.

Various factors were responsible for the early use of corridors for gangways in Scandinavia. One was the benefit conferred by through communication in the event of trains becoming snowbound, a not uncommon occurrence. Another may have been the fact that in the middle of last century, Sweden was the one of the hardest drinking countries in the world. Mark Twain complained, in a criticism of the European compartment carriage, that when a drunk boarded the train an sat down beside one, it was impossible to move farther down and get away from him. Writing in 1879, Robert Louis Stevenson gave a graphic description of a troublesome drunk being run through an American car and thrown off the back platform by a muscular conductor. The side-door compartment coach has vanished from regular service in Norway and Sweden, but the fallplate gangways from carriage ti carriage survive to this day on all except the crack express trains, and may be seen in many Central and Eastern European countries as well. On local trains, the gangway is sometime extended to the locomotive, as in the original Chubb and Fry patent, usually on tank engines, though at least on Swedish company employed small corridor tenders.”

Vet inte så mycket om bokens författare, Hamilton Ellis, och därmed hans kompetens och trovärdighet.

Ola Ahlström
Malmö


Hela tråden: