Re: Guards Vans

[Lambing Flat <bullack@cia.com.au>]

Ocean Springs wrote:

> I have always assumed that a guards van is somewhat analogous to a caboose in that a
> member of the train crew rides on it for whatever reason.
>
> Is this correct? Are guards vans still used and are they attached to the rear of the
> train?

G'day Mate!

While our brake vans did share with cabooses a tendency to be found at the rear of the
train and contain a member of the train crew or two, I dispute most strongly the
assertion made by some of the other respondents that a caboose and a brake van were more
or less the same thing.  As you mentioned in your original post the North American
caboose was above all a travelling office for the conductor and mobile bunkhouse for the
train crew.

The Australian brake van fulfilled a lot of other functions that, as far as I know, were
not, or rarely, carried out in the same form by North American cabooses.

The local name is a pointer to the original function of the Australian brake van, and it
wasn't the only thing that was inherited from our British forebears.

The brake van's original function was to provide hand braking power for our early trains,
as our original engineers, like the British railways that trained them, did not think it
necessary to fit continuous automatic brakes!  (NSW passenger trains were not continuous
braked till the 1890s and while most goods vehicles were fitted with continuous brakes by
the 1930s, non-air coal hoppers were still being used around Newcastle during the 1970s!)

So, the original function of the brake van was to provide braking power on trains that
were not fitted with continuous brakes.  The employee whose job was to apply an release
the handbrakes was the Guard, and he became so associated with brake vans that they were
also commonly referred to as Guard's vans.  As the guard's hand braking function became
less important he started to aquire other functions, and the layout of brake vans were
adjusted to suit.

Just as in Britain, there came to be a difference in appearance and function between the
brake vans used on goods trains and those used on passenger trains.

>From about the 1880s till the practice died out in the 1970s, one of the most important
functions of the brake van was the conveyance of small parcels, known as "out-ofs" here
(in NSW), (from "out of " the van).  In the days when just about everything went by rail
and country centers depended completely on the train for all their daily requirements,
this traffic was heavy and very important, which is why most Australian brake vans were
almost completely given over to compartments for the carriage of this traffic.

The other important feature that distinguishes Australian brake vans, as has been
mentioned in other replies, was the passenger compartment that was included in just about
every brake van that was not a dedicated passenger van.  In the days before cars, or
indeed in many parts of Australia, roads!, just about every goods train might contain the
odd passenger, some very odd indeed!  Commercial travelers, in particular, were great
users of goods trains while doing the rounds of their country territories.  These
compartments were also used to convey the drovers who accompanied every stock (livestock)
movement.

Very little paperwork, (in comparison to NA conductors), was carried out by Guards other
than recording their train compositions, filling in the Guard's Journals, keeping the
driver's sheet up to date and keeping track of the "value" parcels.  Most paperwork
regarding train movements was kept by the yard and station staff.

There were exceptions, of course, Victorian Z vans did not have passenger accommodation
and South Australia (after Webb) used, on goods trains, some vans that closely resembled
cabooses.  The Commonwealth Railways did use relay vans for accommodating off duty crew
while in motion, but the normal practice in Australia was for off duty crews to be booked
off and sent to "Barracks", which were rest houses provided by the railway.

By the end of brake vans in 1985 (in NSW) the only function that remained was to provide
a vehicle to convey the Guard and providing a very expensive and complicated to maintain
vehicle weighing in the vicinity of 20 tons was finally seen for the obsolete practice
that it was.

As an ex Guard myself, I was sad to see the vans go, but their demise was inevitable, and
anyway, the best way to preserve the highly picturesque, but economically foolish
practice of having brake vans at the end of trains is to build models of them!

This is, of course, only the briefest of overviews of the role of the brake van in
Australian railway history.  Doing justice to the full story would require more time,
space and research than I have employed here!

DPC James McInerney

STOP!  In The Name Of The Lore!

At http://www.cia.com.au/bullack/ , "Lambing Flat's" mainpage for the HO model and NSWGR
information.
Or http://www.cia.com.au/bullack/rvrtitle.html  for the "Rurr Valley Railway", my G gauge
garden line