Slip carriage
A slip carriage or slip coach is a railway carriage that is uncoupled from the train while it is in motion and stopped at the next station .
business
In Europe , slip carriages were only used in Great Britain . The local railway companies were under great competitive pressure and endeavored to keep travel times as short as possible and to avoid intermediate stops as much as possible.
In order to be able to serve intermediate stations without losing time to stop, one or more slip carriages were attached to the end of the train . They were cut off before the car entered the destination station : the coupling between the main train and the slip carriages was disconnected. The vehicle rolled into the station and was stopped by the conductor with the handbrake on the platform while the train trunk was able to drive through the station at the maximum permitted speed.
The use of slip carriages had various disadvantages. There was only one way to travel. A locomotive had to be available in the destination station to park the car and the car had to be provided to another train for the return journey to the starting station. Each slip carriage of a train also had to be manned by a specially trained conductor.
The first slip coaches were used in 1851 (other sources: 1858), most of the connections existed in the years before the First World War . Because of the effort involved, this mode of operation has become uneconomical over the years. No slip coaches ran during the Second World War , after that only on the Great Western Railway (GWR) routes . After the nationalization of the GWR in 1948, there were still around twelve connections with slip coaches . From 1959 there was only one car left to Bicester, which was transported by a train at 5:10 p.m. from Paddington station . In September 1960, this mode of operation finally disappeared.
From today's (and continental European) point of view, it seems dangerous to uncouple a car while driving and let it coast. However, the procedure was practiced by renowned railway companies for decades without having any influence on the accident statistics.
literature
- Charles Fryer: A history of slipping and slip carriages (= Oakwood series . No. X60 ). Oakwood Press, Oxford 1997, ISBN 0-85361-514-4 (English).
Movie
- PB Whitehouse and John Adams: By Slip Coach to Bicester . Great Britain 1960. Documentary . 5 minutes.
Web links
Individual evidence
- ^ A b John Huntley: Railways in the Cinema . Shepperton, Allan, London 1969, ISBN 978-0-7110-0115-2 , pp. 118 (English).