GWR Route: Banbury to Wolverhampton

GWR Route: North Warwickshire Line

Tyseley Shed: gwrt3211

Ex-Great Western Railway sixty-one foot long, bow-ended, third class, corridor coach No 5264 in the sidings alongside the Tyseley Carriage Shed in May 1948. This is the corridor side of the coach showing the large flush windows (glazed with Vita-glass) in the galvanised steel sheet sides which clad a wooden framework. The corridor side had doors that aligned with each of the eight compartments and there was also a toilet at each end. The external end hand rails doubled as pipes to fill the roof top water tanks for these facilities. These diagram C59 coaches were built as part of special new stock for the Cornish Riviera and Torbay Limited Expresses and utilised nearly all of the 9 feet, 5¾ inch width made possible by the old broad gauge lines. Even the chromium plated door handles and grips were recessed to maximise the internal width. The General Appendix to the Rule Book (1936) required a red triangle to be placed on each end of the vehicle to signify that the coach could not be accepted by any other company and could only be worked on specific routes within the Great Western Railway company’s area. As well as the Paddington to West Country and South Wales main lines, these wide coaches were allowed to operate on the Northern main line from Paddington through Birmingham as far as Oxley Sidings, just north of Wolverhampton.

The table below gives details of the twenty-five diagram C59 coaches built and the running numbers of those which were specifically allocated in the company’s carriage register to principle expresses (each of the express coach sets included two of these third class coaches).

Robert Ferris

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