Opening Doors and Windows on a VR PL Coach

Open Doors and Windows on Victorian Railways PL Coaches

Who remembers those >35 °C (>95 °F) days before air conditioning? Travelling in those country coaches with sliding doors, we would open the windows, slide the doors back and even stand in the open doorways (there was no workplace health and safety in those days), but we still sweltered! Such was the case with the Victorian Railways (VR) country PL excursion coaches where many had sliding doors. These were also the last PLs in service when withdrawn in the early 1980s!

VR HO scale coaches, whether RTR or kits, have always been manufactured with closed windows and they have also been swing-door coaches. However, the recent release of the excellent SDS (Austrains NEO) retooled PL 59 ft 9-inch country coaches have been manufactured as the sliding door version. The doors are moulded into the body as closed, so they do not slide; this is not a criticism of the model. [Editor’s Note: Refer to the review of these coaches in the October 2020 issue of AMRM.]

Thus, there is an opportunity to kit-bash PL sliding door coaches to have open doors and windows to replicate what we used to see on those hot days.

History

The electrification of Melbourne’s suburban rail network from 1914 resulted in modifications and lengthening to the existing steam-hauled suburban stock of A, AB, B and other classes of coaches. This meant new underframes had to be constructed for what became the ‘dog box’ electric suburban trains that left many old surplus underframes.

Around this time there was a shortage of excursion coaches for locomotive-hauled country trains. From 1918, the VR — forever adept at re-using surplus parts — made two new longer underframes by ‘cutting and shutting’ three of the old under-frames and placing on them new bodies of 58 ft 0¼-inch, 58 ft 6-inch and 59 ft 9-inch. These new coaches were classified as PL. They had sliding doors, a central aisle that was divided by three full-height partitions with sliding doors, segregating smoking, non-smoking and ladies sections, similar to the suburban electric Tait cars.

In country service with the higher speeds and, in places, poor track quality, these sliding doors were