page_title: Great Western Railway
section_title: Carriages
hierarchical_section_title: Great Western Railway / Motive power and rolling stock / Carriages
caption_attribution_description: English: Great Western Railway coach number 7377, a diagram E164 Brake Composite built c.1948 (Lot no. 1690). Preserved on the South Devon Railway.
context_page_description: The Great Western Railway was a British railway company that linked London with the southwest and west of England, the West Midlands, and most of Wales. It was founded in 1833, received its enabling Act of Parliament on 31 August 1835 and ran its first trains in 1838. It was engineered by Isambard Kingdom Brunel, who chose a broad gauge of 7 ft —later slightly widened to 7 ft ¹⁄₄ in —but, from 1854, a series of amalgamations saw it also operate 4 ft 8 ¹⁄₂ in standard-gauge trains; the last broad-gauge services were operated in 1892.
  The GWR was the only company to keep its identity through the Railways Act 1921, which amalgamated it with the remaining independent railways within its territory, and it was finally merged at the end of 1947 when it was nationalised and became the Western Region of British Railways.
  The GWR was called by some "God's Wonderful Railway" and by others the "Great Way Round" but it was famed as the "Holiday Line", taking many people to English and Bristol Channel resorts in the West Country as well as the far southwest of England such as Torquay in Devon, Minehead in Somerset, and Newquay and St Ives in Cornwall.
context_section_description: GWR passenger coaches were many and varied, ranging from four- and six-wheeled vehicles on the original broad-gauge line of 1838, through to bogie coaches up to 70 feet (21 m) long which were in service through to 1947 and beyond. Vacuum brakes, bogies and through-corridors all came into use during the nineteenth century, and in 1900 the first electrically lit coaches were put into service. The 1920s saw some vehicles fitted with automatic couplings and steel bodies.
  Early vehicles were built by a number of independent companies, but in 1844 the railway started to build carriages at Swindon railway works, which eventually provided most of the railway's rolling stock. Special vehicles included sleeping cars, restaurant cars and slip coaches. Passengers were also carried in railmotors, autotrains, and diesel railcars. Passenger-rated vans carried parcels, horses, and milk at express speeds. Representative examples of these carriages survive in service today on various Heritage railways up and down the country.
  Most coaches were generally painted in variations of a chocolate-brown and cream livery, however they were plain brown or red until 1864 and from 1908 to 1922. Parcels vans and similar vehicles were seldom painted in the two-colour livery, being plain brown or red instead, which caused them to be known as "brown vehicles".
caption: A coach in the chocolate and cream livery used from 1922
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