Slam-door Trains

In November 2005 electrical mark II slam-door trains, which were unique to southern England, were finally phased out. Some of these trains had been in service for over 50 years and had replaced steam trains.

With funding from the Arts Council and the three train operating companies, this project documented the trains for their final year and a half. The work was purchased by the National Rail Museum for their permanent collection.

The spaces in which we travel seldom catch our attention, unless it is perhaps to moan about the lack of a seat or the all-too obvious presence of someone else’s elbow, bag or idea of ‘personal’ entertainment.

Yet a railway carriage’s design structures our experience of mobility as a kind of industrialised process. In return for the advantages of comparative speed and reliability, we have for some 200 years submitted ourselves to the tyranny of the timetable – an act which requires us to herd ourselves in and out of the train with near split-second timing lest those advantages be lost.

For the first century of railway travel, there was no real alternative to the slam-door. By the 1930s, Britain’s railways were beginning to experiment with pneumatically operated sliding doors for commuter trains. But the heavy volume of traffic around London meant that, apart from the Underground, where particular conditions applied, the advantage continued to lie with the older technology. Simplicity and low cost allowed many doors per carriage, distributing passengers more evenly along the train’s length, thus reducing the waiting time at stations and making it harder to divide the carriage between the “haves’ with seats and the ‘have-nots’ without.

And in an age when personal safety was less mandated by technology, the slam-door permitted the rebellious or just plain foolhardy passenger the freedom to buck the system by alighting before the train stopped. As Maxine Beret’s keenly observed photographs make us aware, the railway carriage is a microcosm of our changing attitudes to railway travel, and to each other.

Professor Colin Divall
National Rail Museum