The PL type carriages were a series of 141 wooden passenger carriages used on the Victorian Railways (VR) system. They consisted of the first class APL, second class BPL and combination second and guard's van, BCPL's.
History The Victorian Railways plan for electrification of the Melbourne suburban rail network began in 1914, with the first electrically-operated trains running in 1918. The original concept involved hundreds of country and suburban carriages being rebuilt, swapping bodies and underframes, and splicing or adding compartments, to achieve the required capacity, with a fairly standardised carriage design for each purpose.
By 1919, so many cars had been converted away from regular country traffic that a shortage was being experienced. There were many surplus underframes from carriages that had been converted to swingdoor-type driving motors. They were not suitable for the heavier electric motor equipment, but it was realised that they could be fairly easily fitted with a new car body to become country passenger vehicles. That resulted in the PL-class carriage.
Underframes were lengthened, using splices, from to almost , and new bodies built to suit.
Development & Construction W. M. Shannon, the CME of the Victorian Railways at the time, supervised a new carriage design utilising the older underframes and other components as deemed possible. The new coaches were distinctive in having arched roofs in lieu of the then-standard clerestory style, as was being used on bogie-wheeled passenger carriages on the Victorian Railways system.Victorian Railways PL Series Coaches: APL, BCPL & BPL - Research Report 7, 1983
All carriages of the new type were similar, with an intent to build roughly equal numbers of first class (APL) and second class (BPL) cars. The standard design involved a centre aisle cutting through nine compartments, similar to the new Tait trains on the Melbourne suburban rail system. The middle seven compartments had ten seats each in facing pairs of two and three, while the end compartments featured longitudinal bench-seating and toilets. Only three doors per side were installed, reflecting the priority of comfort over reduced dwell times on the country network.
A single compartment (with toilets) at the no.1 end of the carriage was reserved for ladies; at the opposite end of each car, three compartments were reserved for smokers, with brass spittoons recessed into the floor. Sliding doors were fitted at every third compartment along the hallway, with an additional sliding door to separate the five non-smoking compartments from the single ladies' compartment. The partitions fitted with sliding doors were full-height and fitted with luggage racks overhanging the seats, while partitions between back-to-back seats were lower.
Looking from the smoking end towards the ladies' end, the two-seat side was on the right and the three-seat side on the left. The side with fewer seats was the lavatory side, while the side with wider seats was the toilet side.
The new carriage bodies cost around £1000 to build ($2000 plus inflation, around $83,000 per body in 2013 dollars). Standard dimensions for the carriage bodies were high, and an overall width of . To suit the underframes made available by the electrification project, the new bodies were built in three lengths - , and .
There was no pattern to which underframes were used for which carriage identities or series. The shortest carriages had 78 seats with 10 passengers each in the middle seven compartments, and four each end in the longitudinal sections. The longer two carriage types had 82 seats, with six passengers in each longitudinal section. The carriage types could be identified externally by the number and spacing of windows on the end compartments. From, but not counting, the last side-door, the shortest carriages had three roughly equally-spaced windows; the medium-length cars had a slightly wider spacing between their windows, and the longest cars had an uneven spacing with two windows immediately adjacent to the door, then a gap wide enough for another, then the toilet/washroom window.
Compartments were typically across, or to allow for an entrance door. Seats were deep, allowing or 2'3" between the seats in the appropriate compartments. The hallway was across. The end compartments took up the remaining space, with the shortest carriages allowing for two seats each side. The medium-length cars allowed and the longest cars allowed . The windows of the washroom and lavatory compartments were frosted-white.
All PL cars were fitted with both a toilet and washroom adjacent to the longitudinal-seating sections of the end compartments. They were each by , one either side of the corridor, with separate doors. A small drinking fountain was located against the end walls.
When first released to service, the PL cars were painted a deep maroon/crimson livery with the labels "FIRST" or "SECOND", as appropriate, adjacent to each door, as well as markings for the "SMOKING" and "LADIES" on the sides of the end compartments in a slightly smaller font. Classes were also marked on the carriage doors. They were notable as the only carriages in the VR fleet with the "LADIES" marking externally. The carriage number and class appeared on the centre of both the carriage body and the underframe.
When built, the majority of vehicles rode on bogies with axles spaced apart. In the mid-1950s, all cars were converted to bogies with axles at , taken from withdrawn suburban trailers. Although dates are not known, some of the earliest conversions were APL 34, 38 and 40, and BPL 43, 49, 49, 52, 83, 94 and 99.
A majority of carriages retained their Pintsch gas lighting, screw couplings and buffers until the late 1950s. They were replaced around the same time as fitting of connecting diaphragms took place. The latter project involved cutting out the middles of walls at either ends of the carriages and fitting a standard inter-carriage walkway/diaphragm unit to the end in its place, with a door which could be locked by railway staff. Until that time the water fonts for carriages were mounted on the end walls between the lavatory and washroom. When that portion of the wall was removed, the fonts were moved into the lavatory area.
Because of the underframe and body attachment/splicing methods used to create the carriages, the resultant fleet had three distinct body types when introduced intro service. The Ian Wright report chose to identify those as Groups A, B and C, whereas the Victorian Railways mainly noted the carriages' lengths over couplers in the Working Time Table addendums and rarely elsewhere. The report does not identify vehicles 28BPL or 47BPL, but they are listed here in groups A and C respectively as the most likely grouping.
Data Group A Group B Group C Total 31 38 74 Fleet No's (initial) APL (1st): 1, 28-33 APL (2nd): 13-20, 50-51 BPL: 42-55 APL (1st): Nil APL (2nd): 1-5, 8-10, 18, 21-26, 28-49, 54 BPL: Nil APL (1st): 2-27 APL (2nd): 6-7, 11-12, 52-53 BPL: 1-41 Fleet No's (final) BPL: 4-46, 48, 49, 50-51, 53-55, 61, 78-79, 81, 83, 85-86, 95-96, 98-99, 101, 124 BCPL: 1, 29-32 BPL: 89-91, 93-94, 100, 102-107, 109-110, 116120, 122, 125, 126 BCPL: 15-20, 22-23, 26 BPL: 1, 3-33, 35-40, 56-60, 63-79, 82, 84, 87 BCPL: 2-8, 21, 24-25, 27-28 Body length 58'0¼" 58'6½" 59'9" Length over buffers/diaphragms (when coupled) 59'11¼" 60'5½" 61'8 Capacity 78 seats 82 seats 82 seats Tare 25t. 11c. 1q. 25t. 11c. 25t. 0c. 5q. Bogies (initial) 6'6" 6'6" 6'6" Bogie centre-to-centre 41 ft 6¾in ? ? Exceptions 17, 19APL with pressure flushing, tare = 26t. 5c. BPL's 43, 48-49, 52, 83, 94 with 8 ft bogies 18, 21-26, 28-33 & 54APL with pressure flushing, tare = 26t. 5c. APL's 34, 38, 40 & 99BPL with 8 ft bogies Hospital/Jubilee train 61BPL
Introduction to service -- Door types, recycling sliding-door components?
APL 1APL entered service at the end of 1918, with classmates (both first- and second-class) entering service every few weeks until 1923. It is thought that the underframe used for 1APL came from carriage 2BC. That carriage body was converted to swing-door suburban motor car 2ABCM, later 156M, the Jolimont Workshops shunting car.
The initial design called for the side doors on each carriage to slide, like the Tait train design. However, in the faster country services, with generally rougher track, those doors tended to cause draughts and slide open regularly, causing passenger complaints. By the time that problem was recognised, carriages had been produced up to 33APL. Before 27APL was released to service, its sliding doors were replaced with swing doors, matching the earlier designs. That proved a success, and so all except 27APL were recoded to second class (BPL), and new carriages 1APL-26APL and 28APL-54APL were built with swing doors.
As a result, although the class never grew beyond APL 54, a total of 87 individual carriages carried the APL code.
The original APL sliding-door fleet became BPL cars 56-87, in no particular order.
In 1932 and 1933, fifteen APL cars were converted to BPL. Second-series APL cars 48, 3, 5, 9, 13, 7, 8, 16, 50, 53, 6, 10, 11, 49 and 15 took BPL numbers 28 and 47 (replacing cars since destroyed) and 88-100. Of those cars, 89, 93 and 99BPL were restored to their previous APL identities in 1949-50. All bar 47, 90, 95 and 98BPL returned to the APL classification from 1952 to 1954, with the last four stragglers returning to the APL classification from 1958 to 1960.
In 1953, 25APL was scrapped following fire damage at the Dudley Street carriage sidings.
From the late 1950s, a large number of APL carriages were retrofitted with pressure-flushed toilets in lieu of the normal drop toilet design. Vehicles known to include that feature were 17-26, 28-33 and 54APL.
In the mid 1960s, it was decided that first-class travellers deserved a better level of service than was being provided by the APL fleet, so those cars were downgraded to second class. The majority were simply reclassified to BPL and renumbered in the series 88-126, with no reference to previous BPL identities, though 8APL returned to 92BPL by chance. Some cars were converted straight to BCPL: cars 11, 53, 52, 27, 6, 12, 7, 34, 39, 5, 41, 37 and 36 were converted second-class composite guards' vans in 1966-1967, and entered service as 2BCPL-14BCPL.
25MT/1BCPL In 1928, APL 20 (hinged-door, over body) was converted to a railmotor trailer, coded 25MT, with buffers and hook-couplings removed and replaced with automatic couplers. It was used as a supplement to the DERM trailer fleet. The conversion involved removal of three compartments at the smoking end, and reworking of nearly all the others. The end ladies' compartment was left unchanged with room for four passengers on two longitudinal seats. The second compartment had swing doors installed, in lieu of compartment 3. External swing-doors were retained in compartment 5, and compartment 6 became the smoking section. Compartments two through five each had ten seats in the standard 2+3 arrangement, using parts from Tait carriages. As a result seats adjacent to the centre aisle did not have armrests on that side. Compartment 6 had seating for seven; the van-end three-seat was removed and a door cut into that partition, forming an access to the men's washroom and lavatory in a single compartment; the men's water font was on the smoking-compartment side of this wall. The van of 1BCPL took the space formerly occupied by compartments 7-9, with an internal length of 19'2". offset sliding and two-piece guards' doors and a parcel shelf. The car had capacity for 51 passengers plus a guard and up to four tons of luggage.