page_title: British Rail Class 415
section_title: Construction
hierarchical_section_title: British Rail Class 415 / Construction
caption_attribution_description: English: Terminal Platforms 1 - 3, with berthed 4EPB EMUs at Blackfriars Station, 1989. View NE, across to St Paul's Cathedral, from Platform 3.
context_page_description: British Rail Class 415 was a suburban 750 V DC third rail electric multiple unit commissioned by the Southern Region of British Railways. Built between 1951 and 1957, it became the most numerous class on the region after the withdrawal of the 4Subs. The final trains were withdrawn in the 1990s, replaced by Class 455, 456, 465 and 466.
  The British Rail designation Class 415 was applied to a group of four coach, 3rd rail electric multiple units constructed between 1951 and 1961 and in service from 1951 to 1995.
context_section_description: The 4EPB units (4-car Electro-Pneumatic Brake) were a development of the Southern Railway (SR) 4Sub design, but incorporating electro-pneumatic brakes, unit-to-unit buckeye couplings, roller blind headcode displays in place of the stencil holders used previously, and without external doors to the driver's cab.  There were motor-generators for the lighting and current control whereas previous practice had been to use series lighting and a voltage divider for the control circuits.
  The first units built were based on Southern Railway designs and utilised standard Southern railway jigs, being constructed using standard Southern Railway components such as doors and underframes and being built to a standard Southern body profile. The doyen of the class, unit 5001, was completed at Eastleigh in 1951. Further examples were built at Eastleigh up until 1957.
  In 1960, the first British Railways design units appeared. Intended to replace the 1925 design Southern Railway suburban electric stock, these units were based on British Railways Mark 1 coaching stock with a different body profile and underframe length from the earlier Class 415 units. The first two units (5301/02), however, were composed of Mark One profile Driving Motor Brake Seconds and Southern Railway profile intermediate vehicles. Unit 5303 was the first to sport intermediate trailers of Mark 1 profile. Two units differed from the rest of the batch in featuring B5 (S) bogies to enable use on peak hour commuter trains to Eastbourne. Reformations over the years, following accidents and incidents, led to a few units becoming composed of a mixture of original design stock of Southern Railway outline and the later, Mark 1 based, British Railways stock.
  In the earlier, Southern-style 5001-5053, 5101-5260 series, most units (all of which were one class only) comprised a driving motor open saloon including brake at each end of the set, sandwiching a trailer open and a high-density (6 per side) trailer ten-compartment vehicle with access from the passenger doors; there was no gangway down the coach. A very small number of these 4-EPBs comprised either two open-trailers or two compartment-trailers. A small number of the trailers had been built as 'composites' – a mixture of First and Third Class – and were later fitted out as 9-compartment one-class vehicles but with the former 1st accommodation still identifiable with extra-wide compartments. In the mid-1960s, a number of compartments were marked as women-only, because of the density of cigarette smoke at rush-hour in the general compartments, but as these were not well-regarded they were withdrawn in the late 1960s in favour of non-smoking cars, marked by inverted red triangles on the windows. At first one car per set was allocated to non-smoking, but soon one driving unit and one trailer in each set were the norm.
  The production vehicles in the BR series 5301-5370 had slightly higher capacity motor coaches, identical vehicles at each end of the set, with an internal partition splitting the saloon into two smaller ones, and a pair of identical trailers each comprising 5 compartments and a 5-bay open saloon, with the compartment end of each coach always back-to-back with its neighbour.
  However, on 23 March 1988, a woman was found murdered in a compartment EPB car on an Orpington/London Victoria working which led to Network SouthEast reconfiguring the then-remaining unrefurbished SR-design 4-EPBs; as a result all compartment stock ran limited workings in busy periods and had a red stripe at the cantrail (the place where the bodysides meet the roof). This stock did not work in service after 8pm and was known as 4COM. These units, being heavier than the EPBs were retained for the winter of 1988/1989 to run overnight keeping the tracks clear of snow.
  Most British Rail Class 415 units were withdrawn in the mid-1980s, owing to their partial replacement by newer stock such as the British Rail Class 455 units and the fact that many units contained asbestos. However, a significant number of the units were "facelifted". The asbestos was r
caption: 4EPBs in Blackfriars in Network SouthEast livery, with St. Paul's Cathedral on the skyline.
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