Met Dreadnought Sets

'Metropolitan Railway Rolling Stock' (James Snowdon) just about has it all.
My most revisited work on the subject.

So unlike the slightly earlier Ashbury stock...  these had short buffers within the set and bar couplings. 

That's right the Bogie stock ran with bar couplings and short buffers. When converted to electric working this continued although the coaches attached to the adjacent motor coaches were altered with either screw couplings and long buffers or buckeyes and central buffing pads.

The reason was that 4 sets (M/N trains) ran with former brake coaches* converted to motor coaches or with saloon stock motor cars later swapped for MV motor coaches (W stock).


*the four BTH cars were all ex brakes whilst the four BWE cars were either two former driving trailers (an interesting story on its own!) or two of the Experimental cars from the Wembley trials.

I'd say the Met stock never used Buckeye couplings; theese to my knowledge were not use don LT until the 1970s when they were introduced on engineering stock. Up till then LT, as the Waterloo & City Line, used Ward couplers.

I'm not sure the Met used full size buckeyes but they didn't use ward couplers. Perhaps knuckle coupler is a better description which I've seen used elsewhere.

I think that on reflection they may have been the same couplers as the T stock. They fitted into a box below the drawhook which would be the right height.

Seven coaches was the limit for Dreadnoughts, owing to length. The Pullman cars were even longer, by about six feet, and when a Pullman was marshalled with a seven-coach set,  two Dreadnoughts were removed, and a Bogie Stock coach included, to accommodate the excess length.

Over on the Metropolitan Railway group on FB someone's just posted a good picture of Met 19, the one that was scrapped just after the war following collision damage, that shows a good amount of detail on the front end. There's no sign of any auto coupler fitment, but I put a tongue in cheek comment that it appears to have an NEM coupler pocket under the buffer beam! There's also a pic of a Met 4-4-4T at Verney Junction in LT livery to drool over. Both shown with Dreadnought stock.

roythebus that link isn't working for me, and so presumably will not work for anyone not in the relevant facebook group.

Brian Hardy's book suggests the bogie stock was ordered/delivered in sets, but they may not have kept in those sets.

Ashbury Stock - actually a misnomer as only the first batch was built by that company:
six car sets, vehicles numbered in two batches. For some reason the second (1900) batch was numbered in reverse order to the earlier (1898) batch.
361-364 and 405-409 (1sts),
365-368 and 410-414 (Comp),
369-372 and 400-404 (2nd),
373-376 and 395-399 (Brake 2nd),
377-380 and 390-394 (3rd),
381-389 (Brake 3rd)

Hardy identifies the eight cars first selected for conversion to electric traction (364, 372, 380, 384, 387, 392, 402, 407) and these all came from just two sets (the last of the 1898 sets and the third of the 1900 sets), suggesting they were still in fixed formations at that time. c 1908, a further sixteen cars were converted 361, 365, 369, 373, 377, 381 (the first set), 388, 393, 398, 403, 408, 413, (the penultimate set) and 368, 376, 397, 412, (the cars left over from the sets used for the first conversion programme), suggesting they were still in fixed formations then.

It is not clear whether the remaining five sets (30 cars) stayed in fixed formations after 1908. There were two other cars (415 and 416) added to the "steam-hauled" fleet (so-called, although they spent much of their lives being hauled by electric locos) after they had started out as trailer cars on the experinmetal electric trains used between Earls Court and HSK. Wehther these were used as spares or whether the whole fleet was interchangeable is not clear.

However, I can see no similar pattern in the conversion of the Dreadnaughts to electric traction in the late 20s/early 30s - for example the first batch converted six 1st class cars, including all three from the second (1923) batch (nos 505-507), and nine 3rd class, of which only two (500, 501) came from the second batch. This suggests that formations were more fluid, at least by then.