Tail Lights & Locomotive Head-Codes

The Liverpool & Manchester railway introduced a rule that every train must
have a light on the rear so the lineside staff could see that no wagons had
been left behind in the section, and also (hopefully) to avoid rear-end
collisions on the line. Originally these lights were red when moving and blue
when stationary. The brake vans attached to trains from the 1850's on carried
lights mounted both on the rear and also on the sides. Both these lights
showed red to the rear and some of the side lights showed white to the front.
When the brake vans disappeared in the 1970's and 1980's a single tail lamp
was attached to the rear of the last vehicle in the train. These lights were still
the standard white oil lamps with a red lens, electric lights, again with a red
lens, appeared in the 1970's and a yellow, flashing, electric rear lamp was
introduced in the mid 1980's.

Head codes were shown on the front of the locomotive itself. These appeared
in about 1850 and originally consisted of a number of white painted oil lamps
which were mounted on brackets fitted to the buffer beam and boiler door of
the loco. These codes showed the type of train, express or slow, goods or
passenger, and were introduced to help the signal man when the line was
being operated on the 'interval' system (described below). The lamps were
carried on a set of four brackets fitted to the locomotive buffer beam and
boiler door. Most codes required only two lamps to be fitted.

Fig ___ Original RCH Code for Locomotive Lamps

The Railway companies had their own variations on this arrangement,
Southern Railway and cross-London trains were fitted with two additional
positions on either side of the smoke box door on the front of the boiler to give
a total of six positions. Other variations were plain white disks used in place of
the oil lamps for day-time working (used by the Southern Railway and London
& North Eastern Railway) whilst some companies had numbers or different
shapes or colours in place of the white disks. At least one company used a
set of small 'semaphore' type signals mounted on the front of the boiler.

At about the time of the 1923 grouping, a new code was evolved, again with
four brackets as before but which only required a maximum of two oil lamps.

Fig ___ RCH revised lamp codes

The Southern Railway continued to use its own system of five positions and
the old Glasgow & South Western and Caledonian lines under LMS
ownership did not conform to these national codes for internal working.

Route Indicating Head Codes

The simple indication of train type, although useful for the interval signalling
system, was not ideal for traffic reporting purposes. Some lines found it
preferable to add an alpha numeric code indicating the service the train was
on (i.e. 'this is the 8.15 London to Manchester service'). The Southern Railway
and Great Western Railway added their own two character (SR) and three
character (GWR) alpha numeric head codes, displayed on metal plates fitted
to the front of the locomotive.

British Railways diesel locomotives built before 1961 for the Southern and
Western regions of British Railways were often fitted with two and three
character headcode boxes to display the special codes used on these lines
(inherited from the SR & GWR). The Southern Region Class 33 (as available
from Graham Farish) for example displayed the code on a simple roller-blind
in the centre cab 'window' and the Western Region 'Warships' (available from
Minitrix) originally had a three-character code box built into the nose.

Fig ___ Southern Region and Western Region Codes

British Railways used the RCH standard lamp codes and adopted the disks
for all locomotives except Diesel Multiple Unit stock. On diesels the lights
were electric and were built-in to the ends of the locomotive body, the discs
were permanently fitted but could be folded in half (the inside face was white,
the 'rear' face of the fold-down upper half was the same colour as the
locomotive). The centre two discs were off-set slightly to the right (that is to
your left when looking at the front of the locomotive). The two additional lights
on either side of the smoke box door were included and on Southern region
diesels the two additional positions were fitted with standard British Railways
fold down disks. On the DMU's there were two lights fitted low down to either
side of the front of the vehicle (rather like headlights on a road vehicle but not
as bright), these replicated the passenger train oil-lamp headcode. On the
DMU's the lights showed white to the front and red to the rear.
In 1960 the disk system was officially replaced by four-character head-code
boxes which displayed the actual diagrammed reference for a particular
service. On steam locomotives these four character head codes were
displayed using metal plates painted black with code letters and numbers
about nine inches to a foot high in white. Diesel locomotives displayed the
code in an illuminated box on the locomotive front. As noted above the code
displayed was related to the specific diagram the train was working and was
intended to assist signalmen in reporting train movements.

The new four character headcodes began to appear in 1961 and the Western
Region diesels had their code boxes modified to show four instead of three
characters. The Southern Region kept its two character codes for internal
workings, and expanded the system to cover all services, but southern
locomotives displayed the full four characters when on inter-regional hauls.

On locomotives fitted with doors to allow the crew to move between

locomotives when 'double heading' the head code was divided in two, with a
two character box to either side of the doors. These doors proved unpopular
and were later welded shut, new locomotives were then built with a four
character headcode box fitted centrally. The four character codes identify the
individual 'diagram' the train is working not just the train type.

Under the original 1960 scheme the first number corresponds in the main to
the old oil-lamp train code letters (shown in brackets):

1 (A) express passenger, mail or breakdown train en route to a job.

2 (B) Ordinary passenger or a breakdown train not going to clear the line.
3 (C) Parcels, empty coaching stock or Freightliner train.
4 (C) Express freight train, fully fitted.
5 (D) Express freight with at least a third of fitted stock connected to the
locomotive.
6 (E) Express freight with no less than 4 fitted vehicles attached to the
locomotive.
7 (F) Express freight, ballast or empty train, unfitted
8 (H) Unfitted through freight or mineral train.
9 (J or K) Mineral or stopping goods train
0 (G) Light engine or engines with or without brake vans.

This was changed in 1968 when steam had gone to:

1 Express passenger or mail, breakdown train en route to a job or a snow

plough going to work.
2 Ordinary passenger train or breakdown train not en route to a job
3 Express parcels permitted to run at 90 mph or more
4 Freightliner, parcels or express freight permitted to run at over 70 mph
5 Empty coaching stock
6 Fully fitted block working, express freight, parcels or milk train with max
speed 60 mph
7 Express freight, partially fitted with max speed of 45 mph
8 Freight partially fitted max speed 45 mph
9 Unfitted freight (requires authorisation) engineers train which might be
required to stop in section.
0 Light engine(s) with or without brake vans

The second character, a letter, indicated the destination of the train. The
regions each had their own codes but inter-regional trains use following
letters:

E Train going to Eastern Region

M " " " London Midland Region
N " " " North Eastern Region (disused after 1967)
O " " " Southern Region
S " " " Scottish Region
V " " " Western Region

The last two numbers identified the actual working involved.

In 1976 British Railways decided that these codes were no longer to be

displayed on the locomotive and they were all set to read OO OO with the
exception of the Western Region Class 50's which had them set to display the
locomotive running number. Eventually the code boxes were painted over,
some were later used to house a high intensity white headlight intended to
help people avoid being run down on the line by the fast moving but quiet
diesel and electric trains.

The four character codes, although not displayed on the locomotive, are still in
use today to describe specific diagrammed workings.