On Sep 25, 1:07 am, Tom Anderson wrote:
On Mon, 24 Sep 2007, Colin Rosenstiel wrote:
In article ,
(Tom Anderson) wrote:

On Sun, 23 Sep 2007, Colin Rosenstiel wrote:

In article om,
(MIG) wrote:

The UNDMs were all from the extra build known as 1949 stock, rather
than 1938 stock as such. I think that 1949 stock consisted of only
UNDMs and trailers and allowed units to be reformed.

Not so at all. Some of the UNDMs (22 out of 92) came from the
remains of the aborted 9 car train experiment.

9 cars? What? Where? When? How?

Read any good book on Northern Line history.

If i ever lay my hands on one, i will. All i can glean from the web is
that some of the later platforms were built to 9-car length, and there was
a plan to run trains with 9 cars, with SDO (or whatever it was back then -
a guard with a key, probably) keeping the rear two cars out of use in the
7-car older sections. I don't know which stations were built for 9 cars -
i'm guessing the 1920s extensions, ie everything north of Golders Green
and Highgate, and south of Clapham Common. I also don't know if the two
rear cars would have been emptied before going into the 7-car section; i
certainly hope so.

The 1938 stock book I quoted from last night described the experiment as
"something that seemed like a good idea at the time" with the
implication that the author thought they were stark staring bonkers to
have tried it!

Ha! Sounds about right. Surely hardly any of the central network would
have been 9-car, so where did they think the passengers in those rear two
cars would be going?


I've been trying to make sense of it as well, and I think it must have
been a kind of overlap, ie a couple of coaches not opened between a
suburb and somewhere in the centre, and then maybe two others going
out of use at the same time, having been emptied in the first half of
the centre.

The early UNDMs I neglected in a previous post were the third coach
in, so that they could still be driven with two coaches taken off in
sidings that were too short.