British Rail coach designations

The London, Midland and Scottish Railway and the London and North Eastern Railway developed systems of identifying railway carriages with alphabetic codes. When British Railways was formed in 1948, it adopted the LNER system.

The codes are made up from a combination of letters, some of which can indicate more than one word; their meaning can only be determined according to their position in the code or the presence of other letters. The letters are:

These letters (except Y and Z) did not usually apply to passenger-rated but goods carrying vans (e.g. parcels vans, horse boxes, milk and fish vans). Their codes were an acronym of their traditional railway description, e.g. GUV for General Utility Vans.

The following list lists those codes that were used on BR cross-referred to the comparable code used by the LMS, with the exception that the letter S ("Second", later "Standard") is used where until 1956 the letter T ("Third") was used. Suffix codes Y or Z are not shown, as these could apply to variants of any or all vehicle types.

In the LNER system, S stood for "Second", a class between First and Third (which latter became Second). The original Second was more or less abolished in the 1870s as a result of the Railway Regulation Act 1844, remaining only in limited use for special services, such as those meeting ships (which retained the three-class system from which railway classifications had originated). In the 1980s, BR renamed Second Standard. Many of the classifications listed below are no longer used, and some did not survive until the "Standard" designation.

Note that in modern usage, composite semi-open vehicles are classified Cso - the s signifying that the Standard portion is open (implying that the First portion is compartments with corridor).

British Carriage and Wagon Numbering and Classification

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