The pros and cons of BR compartment stock

Please bear in mind those strictures if you come down here to the West Country. Especially at university term commencement/end!

The other point on that score, booking three different sets of passengers onto the same seats, then changing the blasted carriage number/letter round and not indicating it electronically.

Anyway, there should now be more scope to ticket-check less intensively on main lines, as most stations require a ticket to get through the barrier onto the platforms and are more frequently manned than in the days of yore.

On the general subject of the thread, the cattle-truck mentality tended to be applied throughout SR seemingly on the basis that as commuters were very much their daily bread, they wouldn't be expecting more spacious or modern accommodation off-peak or at weekends. I mainly used WR ER & LMR at weekends on the way to Man. Utd. matches, but I do recollect that the stock per se seemed to be more spacious than that in which I commuted to London from near Maidstone, sometimes it was more modern and definitely it was always cleaner.

And, be it noted, there was a lot less use of compartment stock beyond SR, even on Intercity, unless you wisely wished to go First, in which case you were treated accordingly well throughout.

Compartments, with or without corridors, were fairly standard fare until about the mid sixties. Some mark 1 carriages, and most first generation dmus, had open second class carriages, and the BR-type HAPs had 2nd class in open accomodation and 1st class in compartments but the SR-design HAPs and the 4CEP, 4CIG, 4VEP emus, the SR demus, and the Transpennine and Inter City dmus all had some compartments in both 1st and 2nd. (I once travelled from Sheffield to Manchester on an all-compartment dmu formation, which must have been a fairly rare event as it required a very odd mixture of class 123 and 124 vehicles to ensure the train had two cabs and a brake van!)

Even after refurbishment, the SR main line emus all had at least one 2nd class compartment.

For inter-city trains, the mark 2 era showed the clearest distinction between 1st and 2nd class, as all second class was open and, up to the first airconditioned stock (mark 2d) all First Class (except Pullmans) was compartments.

The only mark 3 compartment stock has been the first Class on the class 442s (since converted to open accomodation) and of course the sleepers (not converted!)

For the real reign of terror, I recommend (not) ticket inspections in Kaunas, Lithuania, where the trolleybus is locked down on arrival at the stop, and a crew of heavily armoured thugs - seemingly employed by the Lithuanian equivalent of Group4 board the bus - and go through it with a tooth comb. Delinquents are frogmarched off the bus (and quite possibly killed and placed in shallow graves at the terminus) and the trolleybus is then released to allow normal disembarkation and boarding... We made sure we bought our tickets for our return trip...