this is not a joke…
the swiss police was worried of the growing jams on the highway and the risks of bein stopped , so they trasferred the transportation of prisoner from the highway to the train. Once a week a special train connects the main cities and make delivery and pick up!
And the older baggage cars still have a small compartiment with barred window and heavy lock to be used for intercity transfer of prisonners. Quite claustrophobic, and I do not know if they are still used.
sebastiano
And what crime would mild mannered Swiss be commiting??
Not PC: Criminals – less likely to be a native-born Swiss, and more likely to be a recent immigrant.
Assault with a deadly Toblerone?
The reason the cage in the baggage car is so small… is because a gnome doesn’t need much room!
Erik
During WW II we had prisoner trains in the U.S. as well. They transferred German and Italian prisoners from the port cities to inland prison camps some as far away as Leavenworth, Kansas. Mostly old heavyweight coaches were used in this service with barred windows. Armed Army troops served as the escorts for the prisoners. I also did a little more homework and found the same was true for Canada in WW II.
During WW2 Germany POW’s would arrive in Halifax, Nova Scotia harbour and be transported by train (don’t know if they were special trains) to Montreal’s Canadian Pacific Windsor Station where they would be kept in a lock-up in the basement till the next day when they would board another train enroute to detention camps out west.
A previous topic mentions that some German POW’s in the US were give train tickets and allowed to travel unescorted on regular passenger trains.
There were coaches built specifically for prisoner transport in the DDR. There was an article and photos in Eisenbahn Jornal or Kurier just after the wall fell. I suspect that they were broken up though.
They would be attached to regular passenger trains as required
There were some scary people out there in Stasiland
There were purpose built prisoner cars in New South Wales, Australia to transfer prisoners from the state capital in Sydney to major prisons in Goulburn and Bathurst.
These were built in 1915 and lasted until the late 1960s, but were not used much after the mid 1950s. They had four prisoner compatments, two each side of a central warder’s compartment. The prisoners sat on wooden benches along windowless side walls, with bars each side of a centre aisle that could be used by the warders, and steel barred gates closing off the compartments. There was a toilet at the outer end of each compartment, so the prisoners need not leave the “cage”. The entry and exit was through central doors either side of the warder’s compartment. There were tiny slit like windows just below the roof. The car was built with a wooden body on a steel frame, and were known as class “BKD”. They were externally identified by the royal cipher “EIIR” (at least in my time), not carried by any other rail vehicles.
Peter
better watch out then…no littering in Europe now!
This posts reminds me of the movie con air. Where a plane is carrying convicts and gets hijacked. Then I thought of the equal for the rails…Conrail! It all makes sense now, conrail was made by the government to transport convicts. It wasn’t freight in those cars it was actually convicts.[(-D]
Andrew
That’s not all. Back in the 30’s the Katy had a couple of steel coaches converted to prisoner cars with barred windows and doors that were used in regular pax service to transport federal prisoners to Leavenworth. Rumor has it that “Machine Gun” Kelly was one of the honored guests.
and he notes -
This subject was covered in a previous thread a few months ago. Several roads had prison cars on hand if the traffic warrented it. Some were rebuilt coaches with barred windows and a cage like wall at either end where guards were stationed. I believe Pullman built or rebuilt a few sleepers too. Their main purpose was to transport convicts to state or federal prisons. I’ m sure they were busy during the War too.
Kalmbach’s “Some Classic Trains” has a photo of one and if anyone has seen “Prison Train” there’s plenty of shots of one in action.