"B" Four-Wheelers

The “B” Series : Four-Wheel Carriages

For the opening of the Peel Line of the railway on 1st July 1873 twenty four of these four-wheel composite carriages were delivered from the Metropolitan Carriage & Wagon Co., of Saltley Works in Birmingham, of similar design and dimensions to the other series of the time. They were made up of three separate compartments, each designed to carry ten people, five on each bench seat (whereas today it is more common to accommodate eight in each compartment with four per seat). Sequentially numbered and later becoming the “B” series, they consisted of twenty-four compartment carriages to the same design being similar to the other three series of four-wheelers. All three compartments were designated as third class with basic seating and drawings of the time show them with dedicated roof-mounted oil lamp housings for each compartment.

Originally intended to operate independently, rakes soon became commonly run in sets of two, and from 1881 a policy of close-coupling them into pairs was embarked upon which later formed the basis of the “pairs” series being two four-wheelers mounted on a bogie underframe; the “B” series was the most prolific of the four-wheel series, and all went on to be paired with some surviving today; B.1, B.6 and B.20 are all restored and in traffic while B.11, B.15 and B.23 survive in their “paired” form all withdrawn from traffic and stored off site. There follows below a page for each carriage detailing how the “B” series were mounted on bogie underframes between 1909 and 1926 and their subsequent fates. Details for each individual vehicle can be found by clicking the links on the left of the panel below which include further details for each carriage:-