Passenger rail car

A passenger car (known as a coach or carriage in the UK, and also known as a bogie in India) is a piece of railway that is designed to carry passengers. The term passenger car can also be associated with a sleeping car, baggage, dining, railway post office and prisoner transport cars.

In some countries, such as the UK, some coaching stock (whether designed, converted or adapted) to not carry passengers are referred to as "NPCS" ( non=passenger coaching stock); similarly some maintenance (engineering) stock can be known as "MOW" - maintenance of way - in the US.

Up until about the end of the 19th century, most passenger cars were constructed of wood. The first passenger trains did not travel very far, but they were able to haul many more passengers for a longer distance than any wagons pulled by horses.

As railways were first constructed in England, so too were the first passenger cars. One of the early coach designs was the "Stanhope". It featured a roof and small holes in the floor for drainage when it rained, and had separate compartments for different classes of travel. The only problem with this design is that the passengers were expected to stand for their entire trip. The first passenger cars in the United States resembled stagecoaches. They were short, often less than 10 ft (3 m) long and had two axles.

British railways had a head start on American railroads, with the first "bed-carriage" (an early sleeping car) being built there as early as 1838 for use on the London and Birmingham Railway and the Grand Junction Railway. Britain's early sleepers, when made up for sleeping, extended the foot of the bed into a boot section at the end of the carriage. The cars were still too short to allow more than two or three beds to be positioned end to end.

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