Coaches of the Great Western Railway

Vacuum brakes, bogies and through-corridors all came into use during the nineteenth century, and in 1900 the first electrically lit coaches were put into service.

Early GWR carriages, in common with other railways at the time, were typically wooden vehicles based on stagecoach practice and built on short, rigid six-wheel (or sometimes four-wheel) underframes, although the 7 ft (2,134 mm) broad gauge allowed wider bodies with more people seated in each compartment.

Some rigid eight-wheeled carriages were produced but vacuum brakes and bogies made an appearance before the end of the broad gauge in 1892.

After switching to 1,435 mm (4 ft 8+1⁄2 in), the GWR had extra space in which it could design and deploy larger-scale rolling stock on former broad gauge lines such as from London to Plymouth and Penzance..

Unlike other railways which were highly dependent on commuters, the GWR had not introduced any high-capacity articulated sets until 1925, which due to their lack of flexibility in use were seen by Swindon as a failure.

[2] With costs rising and revenues falling, General Manager Sir Felix Pole had told Chief Mechanical Engineer Charles Collett to develop more powerful economic designs, which lead to his adaption of his predecessor George Jackson Churchward's design, as opposed to the taking on board of new steam technology such as Sir William Stanier did at the London, Midland and Scottish Railway.

However, in 1929 the GWR Board approved Collett's proposed development of a larger and more accommodating carriage, as had been tried with the earlier "Dreadnoughts".

From 1936 onwards, all new GWR main line stock had large windows to each compartment and entry-exit via the corridor and end vestibules, but it had taken Collett six years to do what the LMS and LNER had been doing since 1930.

[2] The livery of early carriages was a dark chocolate brown but from 1864 the upper panels were painted white which became a pale cream after being varnished and exposed to the weather.

Certain vehicles such as parcels vans and horse boxes, which were allowed to run in passenger trains, were often painted in just chocolate brown when the passenger carrying coaches were in chocolate and cream, and so this non-passenger carrying coaching stock came to be known as "brown vehicles".

The GWR pioneered telegraphic communication in 1839,[1] and a number of code words came to be used to represent various carriage types.