According to Chris…
…hospitality had a very different definition in the 1950s.
Chris discusses how railway hospitality in the 1950s differs to today.
M eet me in the Tavern Car, At the Sign of the Jolly Tar* when we leave Waterloo. We can have a drink and a meal and be back in our window seats before Salisbury. That way we’ll miss Surbiton and Woking and be out of the restaurant car in time to enjoy the countryside. Mr Bulleid wouldn’t want us loitering in the bar.” It’s Christmas time, hospitality is much in the news, and I’m writing this on my birthday.
Bulleid’s windowless tavern car restaurant twin-sets have long fascinated me. I was too young to recall ever seeing one but they were part of the Southern Region of my childhood and, together with blue ‘Merchant Navy’ 4-6-2s, blood and custard carriages and black and silver LMS diesels, they fit the period which I like to reflect on my layout.
I keep hoping that one of those new product announcements will bring us a tavern car set but it doesn’t happen. Nor, however, does the blue ‘Merchant Navy’. Hornby has even promised new ‘MNS’ this year but, sadly, they are all green again. I have two abiding images of the railway from when I was four or five years old. They are the Down ‘Bournemouth Belle’ sweeping round the curve at Weybridge with the gleaming black and silver No. 10000 on the front and an Up express racing past the goods yard with a blue ‘Pacific’ on carmine and cream stock.
For some strange reason, the tavern cars epitomize that period in my mind, and I have a partly built Southern Pride kit that must have been partly built for 20 years or more. There’s no good excuse for that. In his Southern Coaches book, Mike King is pretty unkind about the tavern cars. I recall that my friend ‘Uncle Mac’ Macleod wasn’t very complimentary about them either, but Mac wasn’t complimentary about anything his boss, Mr Bulleid did! Southern management wanted more income from on-train catering, and that meant a faster throughput of customers.
It was felt that the inability to gaze out of the window would incentivise passengers to return to their window seats as quickly as possible. In fact it brought widespread criticism, particularly as some of the tavern car sets were transferred to the London Midland and Eastern Regions, where they served on trains including the ‘Master Cutler’ and the ‘Norfolkman’.
However, it was not just their lack of windows that brought notoriety to the tavern car sets. Each two-car set comprised a bar kitchen car and a full-seating dining car. While the former was dressed up like a pub inside and out, the dining car had its seats with their backs towards the sides of the car, making access to the tables easy for staff but presenting all the ambience of a school dining hall. Externally, of course, the cars were finished in the standard carmine and cream of the period, but the bar section had its carmine embellished to look like brickwork, while the cream area carried imitation half-timbering!
Introduced in 1949, all eight tavern car sets were converted to more conventional dining arrangements, with windows during 1950 and 1951. Obviously, any ready-to-run model would have to be a twin-pack of both cars and the manufacturer would need to tool bodies with and without windows. The original version would not need an interior but to borrow the philosophy of Rapido’s Jason Shron, it would be good to know it was there, even if you couldn’t see it.
In these times when manufacturers are seeking new and different prototypes to model, almost every obscure one-off locomotive is either proposed or promised, however ill-considered, controversial or unsuccessful it was. From the GWR gas turbine, a technological dead-end, to the Fell, the Frankenstein of diesels, there is a perverse attraction to the obscure, the awful and the unsuccessful, which manufacturers are tapping into. Perhaps the odd coaching stock novelty such as the tavern cars or the CIWL sleeping cars would prove equally attractive to modellers. Or, dare I suggest (Rapido UK are you listening?) the Budd Silver Princess! *The traditional English pub styling of the tavern cars included a pub name sign on the half-timbered woodwork of the body sides. Each name was preceded by the words ‘At the sign of the…’
Mr Bulleid wouldn’t want us loitering in the bar