Slip coach
[a] The detached portion continued under its own momentum following the main train until slowed by its own guard using the brakes, bringing the slip to a stop, usually at the next station.
[3] Competition increased as locomotives became bigger and able to haul heavier trains at faster speeds for longer distances, trains no longer need to stop so often, for fuel and water for themselves, using water troughs (North America: track pans) to fill up on the move, or for facility stops for passengers by providing corridor coaches, dining and sleeping carriages.
Faster services were becoming progressively safer as more efficient continuous braking was fitted and the absolute block system installed on main lines.
[7] Slip carriages are quiet: they are usually equipped with a horn to sound warnings to people near the track if there is time, but their silence has proven fatal, as in the case of a railway worker whose inquest returned a verdict of accidental death when he stepped into the way of a recently released slip at Market Harborough.
[10] The earliest example of slipping occurred on the London and Greenwich Railway (L&GR) when it opened in February 1836 between Deptford and Spa Road.
Once the slipped portion had stopped at the platform the engine to haul it to Hastings was allowed to exit the siding where it had been waiting and attach itself to the front of the new train.
[19] The Great Western Railway (GWR) followed suit when on 29 November 1858, carriages were slipped at Slough and Banbury off London Paddington to Birmingham trains.
[20] The South Eastern Railway (SER) was an early user of slip services: there is a possibility that it began this a month before the LB&SCR, in January 1858.
Perhaps the most compelling reason, according to The Manchester Guardian, was the lack of corridor connections to the rest of the train: slip-coach passengers could not access the restaurant car.
It operated as two independent side-by-side railways, each worked by stationary engines and a rope which was wound on and off large drums at each end of the line.
[38] The B&ER introduced slip carriages in 1869 on its reinstated Flying Dutchman service between Bristol Temple Meads and Exeter St Davids.
The slip appears to have run on its own momentum into Paddington terminus where it was due three minutes after its host train arrived at Bishop's Road.
Slips were made at: Leamington, Knowle, Warwick, Reading, Maidenhead, Hatton, Banbury, Slough, Taplow, Twyford, Fenny Compton, Church Stretton, Wantage Road, Didcot and Bridgwater and other stations.
[44] In 1910 there were ten slips at Reading, six at Hatton providing through trains to Stratford-upon-Avon, five at Slough for Windsor & Eton Central, five at Banbury, four at Taunton and Bridgwater, connecting with the Somerset & Dorset Joint Railway to Glastonbury and twenty-two other places, including the slipping of a mail coach at Pylle Hill, Bedminster, Bristol.
[j][51][52] After their early start in 1858 the LB&SCR slowly adopted slip-coach practices with three services in 1875 rising to nine in 1900, by which time they had used them at seven different places.
[55][56] In 1914, slips were being made at Arundel, Ashurst for the branch to Tunbridge Wells West, Barnham Junction for Bognor Regis, East Croydon and Sutton for London Victoria and London Bridge whichever the main train was not going to, Haywards Heath then either stopping at Haywards Heath, going on to Lewes or forming a slow train to Brighton, Horley for stations to East Grinstead, Polegate of trains heading towards London for Hastings, Preston Park and Three Bridges for Eastbourne.
Despite the uncertainties they rose back to eighteen in 1922, but after the Southern Railway was formed their policy combined with a gradual electrification of the main lines reduced the need for slips and they had all stopped by April 1932.
This service catered for a cluster of residences of prominent people who lived close to the station and had "formed a sort of travelling club", including a director of the GCR and later the LNER.
[60][92] There was a dramatic rise in slip numbers in 1888, with 25 daily slips taking place in eighteen different places:Ambergate, Ashchurch, Berkeley Road, Blackwell, Bromsgrove, Cudworth, Defford, Harpenden, Heeley, Kettering, Luton, Market Harborough, Melton Mowbray, Oakham, Rotherham, St Albans, Syston and Wigston.
Essendine also had up to six daily slips for the branches to Stamford East and Bourne on the Midland and Great Northern Joint Railway.
[53] In SE&CR pre-war days slips were provided at Ashford, for Hythe and Sandgate, Farningham Road or Swanley for Chatham, Faversham, Herne Hill and Shorncliffe.
In 1896, it began to slip a portion in the evening off a Belfast train at Malahide only nine miles north of Dublin to cater to commuters.
[123][124] In 1932, the 3:15 p.m. northbound from Dublin to Dundalk achieved the first scheduled mile-a-minute (60 miles per hour (97 km/h)) run in Ireland whilst slipping a coach at Drogheda.
As soon as the slip coach guard knew that he had been detached, he used his hand brake to make sure that he did not catch up with the main train, which had itself to slow for the curve south of the station.
The officer conducting the inquiry concluded that the accident appears to have been the result of a hazardous system of working, and the inexperience of the guard of the detached portion of the train.
The cause was apparently that one of the slip coach tail lamps had gone out, the signalman only seeing one light assumed the train had had an unscheduled split and part of it had been left behind.
Brakemen onboard then turned the handbrakes furiously in order to stop alongside the passenger platform inside the shed.
[151]The Boston and Maine Railroad used flying switches at White River Junction from mixed, freight and passenger, trains and had a fatal accident involving one on 8 March 1889.
[152] The Old Colony Railroad used flying switches at junction stations, where slip coaches would be attached to a locomotive to continue on the branch line.
[163] A Narrow Escape was published in Pearson's Magazine, 1897 where a wanted man disappeared from a train utilising a slip coach.
