British Railways inherited a variety of brake vans from each of the Big Four: GWR, LNER, Southern Railway and LMS due to the nationalisation of the railways in 1948.
A brake van, on a train, is a wagon at the rear of a Goods train where a guard would sit with a hand brake. The job of this wagon was to provide extra braking force for a train and as an emergency hand brake, should an unfitted train become uncoupled from the locomotive and become a runaway train.
All brake vans served the same purpose: to supplement brake-force to a train. Brake vans are operated by the Guard, a member of staff on the train, who is in charge of making sure that the lights are in the correct place. This is because a signalman would need to see the tail-lamp to know that the train had not split, so that he can clear the line.
Most vans had both normal brakes and vacuum brakes. They also contained a fire for the comfort of the Guard.
Many brake vans today are used on heritage railways as passenger vehicles, like on the Helston Railway and the National Railway Museum demonstration lines at York and Shildon.
History
From the earliest days of railways in the Britain until 1890s, trains were rarely fitted with a continuous brake system for the entire train. Slowing and stopping trains relied on a brake on the locomotive, and brake vans and carriages, which had hand brakes that would slow and stop trains. This, combined with the coupling design of the era, buffer and chain coupling, which was prone to unexpected failure, resulted in many incidents of wagons and carriages rolling away uncontrolled. The Armagh rail disaster in 1889, where the rear portion of a passenger train ran away down a grade, colliding with a following train, killing 80, resulted in the Regulation of Railways Act 1889. This act, addressing key issues in the disaster, introduced minimum requirements for the brake systems on passenger trains.
However, the Regulation of Railways Act 1889 was only specific to passenger trains, and any carriages and wagons that may form a passenger train. Freight trains, were still not required to have a continuous brake system, thus brake vans still remained a fixture on freight trains, and runaways still occurred. These trains, without continuous brakes, were referred to as "unfitted", reflecting the fact they were not fitted with a continuous brake. By the mid-twentieth century, this would start to change as freight wagons with brakes began to appear on the railway, however the phase out of wagons not equipped continuous brakes took decades. As result, "partly fitted" trains, where only some of the wagons had continuous brakes, while others in the train did not, would be prevalent into the 1970s. However changes in freight traffic, freight wagon design and the demands of overall railway environment would see the near elimination of unfitted and partly fitted freight trains by the 1980s.
Pre-British Rail
Each railway produced its own design of brake van, and there was considerable variety. Generally, brake vans were kept within the owning railway, and when a goods train passed from one railway to another with the locomotive being changed at the exchange point, the brake van would be changed as well. From 1942, wartime conditions ended this practice, and brake vans were pooled; consequently, the Railway Clearing House designed a British Standard Brake Van, to be used by all the railways. Four were built by the LMS in 1943, which kept the first one for themselves and supplied one to each of the other three companies. The GWR, LMS and SR did not adopt this, and continued with their own designs.
