I am modeling heavyweight passenger cars. I have seen several threads about the usual position of cars in a train that are have been very informative. My questions are: 1) Were coach cars always oriented with the seats facing forwards? 2) Were sleeper cars usually oriented with a particular end towards the front of a train? I know that diners usually had the kitchen towards the coach cars in front and that observation cars obviously had the platform in the back.
I’m gonna guess that when you say “couch cars” you mean “coaches”?? A coach would normally run with the seats facing forward. In the heavyweight era many had some version of a “walkover” seat where the back could be moved across the seat so that the seat faced the other (It’s a little hard to explain how it works without a visual) so the car wouldn’t need to be turned, just the seats.
Otherwise except for specialized cars and situations, which direction the car faced didn’t matter so much with heavyweights, since they had vestibules/doors at both ends (whereas most lightweight cars only had one vestibule at one end.) An exception might be a sleeper that had rooms or compartments on one side of the car and the aisle on the other side. That car might be turned on a turntable so that the side the passengers sat on always faced the side that say a river or canyon or some other attraction was on. But that wasn’t common.
I’ll ditto what he said and expand.
an example of a specialized car would be a dormitory - lounge. These would be run directly behind the baggage or RPO and the dorm end would be in front. There were other variations of dorm cars including dorm baggage.
Any car carrying mail would be positioned immediately behind the locomotive (or at the extreme rear on branchlines without turning facilities.) If there were other sections in the car, for baggage or passenger seating, the mail end would be away from the rest of the consist. There was a solid bulkhead at each end of the mail section - no centerline door in the car end, for example. (That was required by Post Office security regulations.)
The, “Blind,” so beloved of train robbers in old western novels, was the doorless end of the mail car, which was directly across from the tender. It made a perfect spot for the robbers to hide until they were ready to climb over the tender and force the engineer to stop the train.
Chuck (modeling Central Japan in September, 1964)
Any express boxcars or reefers would usually be located immediately behind the locomotive.
Mark
Of greater interest to me is how many railroads made an effort to turn sleepers so the majority of rooms face the right hand side looking forward so as to limit noise from passing trains (CNW excluded!).
I have never noticed an effort to keep the sleeper isle to the left. The NYC did NOT turn the 20th Century sleepers - They wanted the rooms to always face the Hudson River. The last time I rode Amtrak, the Superliner room I was in faced the other double track on the BNSF. Most of the diner/sleeper cars had the isle on the right, based on the ‘A’ end of the car running forward. The Milwaukee Skytop sleepers had the isle on the left(facing the double track).
Jim
Can’t say I’ve ever heard of any doing that. Keep in mind the most common Pullman by far was the 12-1 with 12 open sections and one drawing room, with a center aisleway. Cars with separate rooms or compartments on one side of the car with a corridor on the other side were certainly around, but would have been greatly outnumbered by center-aisle cars with open sections like 12-1s or 16 section tourist sleepers.
There is evidence that the PRR did wye trains in Chicago for that reason. Sunnyside yard on Long Island had a ballon track to turn the entire train when it entered the yard. So they were turned if not in Chicago at least every trip to New York. The IC had a balloon track near where the N&W main crossed the IC main in south CHicago. The trains from the IC station in CHicago would back to and around it for their trip back south. So yes some trains always had the same orientation regardless of direction.
Chuck’s statement that any car carrying mail would be immediately behind the locomotive isn’t born out by the facts, nor is the idea that when there’s a combined mail-baggage car, the mail (RPO) end is always forward. Here are a few examples from my book, “The Model Railroader’s Guide to Passenger Equipment & Operations.” On page 45, a photo of the Union Pacific’s Omaha-to-Los Angeles “Utahn” shows the train’s baggage-RPO car fourth behind the locomotive with the baggage end leading. (What appears to be a 60-foot “full” RPO immediately behind the power in that photo is actually an older mail car that the UP re-assigned for storage mail service.) On page 60, the baggage-RPO car in the New York Central train has the mail compartment forward, but it’s the second car in the train behind a baggage-express car. On page 83, the UP’s “Los Angeles Limited” has its mail-baggage car right behind the 4-8-4’s tender, but it’s the only head-end car on the train and the mail compartment is to the rear. The end doors of RPO cars and apartments could be locked from inside, but they were often left open when storage mail space was assigned in adjacent baggage compartments or storage mail cars. That way the RPO clerks could move bagged mail into the working RPO for sorting and then back to the storage space for later unloading. An example of this is the Santa Fe “Chief” on page 87 of my book, which had a 60-foot full RPO, a heavyweight car at the time of the photo, between two lightweight baggage-express cars used as working storage mail cars. There are examples in the book of trains with mail-baggage cars right behind the engine and with the mail compartment forward, but that was by no means a universally required placement and orientation. And by the way, my book has a lot to say about the formation of the rest of a passenger train too. So long, Andy
"1) Were coach cars always oriented with the seats facing forwards? "
On older heavyweight coaches such as Stillwells, old (1917) Osgood Bradleys and Pullman, seat backs could be switched to face forward. This solved the problem of turning cars.
Alot of folks (even today), get motion sickness if they are not sitting in the direction of the train’s motion. On modern cars, whole sections of seats will face in one direction or another.
Regards,
Mark W.
I hadn’t thought about it, but the most common Pullman cars (12-1 and tourist sleepers) had pairs of seats facing each other, so it didn’t really matter that much which direction the car was going.
I’ve heard that the problem with sitting “backwards” is kind of an American issue…apparently in Britain and in Europe people think nothing of sitting backwards on trains; but for us Americans it makes us sick. [xx(]
Really? I’ve never heard of this.
On the Horizon coaches used in Amtrak’s “Hiawatha” service between Milwaukee and Chicago, half the seats in each coach usually face one way and the other half face the other, with a pair of facing seats at the center of the car. The seats are reversible, but to save time in this push-pull service they are just left so that half the riders face backward. I believe the same is true for Amtrak’s “Pacific Surfliners” between Los Angeles and San Diego, but I’ve only made one round trip on that line. When I ride these trains, I do my best to find a forward-facing seat (also one next to a window rather than a pier panel). However, on those rare occasions when I’ve ridden in observation cars, facing backward has been quite pleasant, with no discomfort about it. So long, Andy
I can’t pass up the chance to speak to the seat orientation discussion, if slightly off topic. As a kid in Dallas in the 40s and 50s, I rode the streetcars a lot, and every time the motorman came to the end of the line he had three jobs: 1.) To leave the car in order to lower the --what do you call that thing that connects the car to the overhead cantenary? – on the rear and raise the one on the now opposite end, 2) To move his ‘stuff’, including the money and tokens from the end of the car he’d been driving to the opposite, and 3) To flip seat backs from forward to ‘new’ forwand as he passed through the car.
I always thought that was pretty neat, unless I was in a hurrry to get downtown to a movie, or maybe to shop at Hall’s Hobby House.
The steam era MP54’s commuter cars (basically a 1920’s era coach) that lasted into the 1970’s had “flopover seats”. Most people preferred to ride facing forwards. The newer “tinnyliners” had the seats in each end permanently facing the ends of the car and in off peak hours most people rode facing forwards.
One othe coolest things was riding the Pig and Whistle out of Norristown and listening to the motorman flop over all the seats in the car. It was so different because the third rail cars were dead silent when sitting at the station (while the other Silverliners always had a blower noise). the motorman would walk down the car with the rythmic squeak ka-thunk, squeak ka thunk, squeak ka thunk, as he changed the direction of the seats.
New Orleans streetcars still have wooden flopover or “walkover” seats. Many’s the time I’ve seen a motorman at the end of the line walk the length of the car pushing over each pair of seat-backs in turn. Reversing the backs also changes the angle of the seat itself. – Andy