The idea is not new: the Times newspaper recently wrote about two 19th-century railway carriages in West Wittering in West Sussex “that were turned into a seaside holiday home after the First World War [and] have [now] been saved from the scrapheap” (Times OnLine, May 19th 2008).

Today, there are several locations to choose from, in the UK and a little further afield. We offer some examples that captured our attention during our research:

Rail Leisure, Lincolnshire

Located in a quiet leafy corner of Lincolnshire the Station Master’s House and The Old Station Yard is ideally situated for the rail enthusiast or more demanding holidaymaker. The holiday homes are trackside, adjacent to The Lincolnshire Wolds Railway, a working heritage line with steam and diesel running days, steeped in character and history and an ideal family destination.

Rail Holiday, Cornwall

This family enterprise based in Cornwall offers you a choice of 3 sympathetically restored carriages:

- a BR Mark 1 Corridor Coach adjacent to the platform at Hayle railway station. This carriage retains most of its original features and is within easy walking distance of the golden sands of Hayle beach

- a Travelling Post Office located on a railway siding adjoining the platform at the village station of St Germans (South East Cornwall)

- an Old Luggage Van located on a delightful site at the western end of St Germans Station

The Old Station, Waiting Room and Carriages at Heacham

The Old Station was once part of the King’s Lynn to Hunstanton Railway Line and although the last train left Heacham Station on 3 May 1969, thanks to Dr Beeching’s cuts, this quaint English railway station refused to fade away and has provided quality self-catering holiday accommodation for many years.

Aberporth Express, Wales

Enjoy some of the finest views in Wales from The Aberporth Express – a converted Edwardian railway carriage located on the coastal footpath between the sandy beaches at Aberporth and Tresaith.

The railway carriage was built around 1905 as a sleeper coach that travelled on the Great Western Railway. This particular coach was called ‘Wendy’ after the character in Peter Pan (published the year before) and travelled the length and breadth of the Great Western line between England and Wales, Wendy retired from service in 1937. She has lovingly been restored back to her 1930s condition. In 2007 she featured in a review in The Guardian newspaper.

Titley Junction Station

Welsh Marches hospitality awaits you in the glorious setting of Titley Junction Station. Located in the most rural of England ’s counties, Herefordshire.

Their beautifully restored 1930’s L.M.S. Railway Carriage has been sympathetically converted to a superior self catering camping coach and sleeps up to 4 adults.

The carriage once formed part of the famous and glittering Silver & Blue liveried “Coronation Scott Express Train” which travelled the prestigious West Coast Main Line in the “Great Race To The North” between London and Glasgow in the 1930’s.

The interior of the carriage retains many of the original fixtures and fittings from an earlier conversion in the 1950’s and provides comfortable accommodation for families and couples.

Coalport Station, Severn Valley

Set in the scenic beauty of the Severn Valley Coalport Station is one of England’s most romantic secrets. Up until 1968 Coalport Station was served by the line running from Shrewsbury to Bridgnorth. The station however is now a home, and host to two fabulous carriages located only yards from a river itself surrounded by trees and away from any bustle.

Los Dos Vagones, Magdalena, Argentina

If you fancy combining your railway interest with a trip to South America then the Rural Tourist Lodge “Los Dos Vagones” ( The Two Boxcars) might be just the ticket (pardon the pun!).

The Lodge is located in the County of Magdalena, which together with the neighboring county of Punta Indio holds an interesting past, part of the Argentine history. They also share international recognition due to the preservation of its natural resources, such as the “Parque Costero del Sur”, declared Natural Patrimony of Humanity by UNESCO, an excellent place to birdwatch and to admire wild nature.

The recycled railroad boxcars have a maximum capacity of 6 persons each and consists of two bedrooms, a bathroom, a kitchen, air conditioning and all the usual basic features to make your stay confortable.

Do it yourself

If this article has captured your imagination and you fancy owning your own disused railway carriage to convert as a holiday home we suggest searching for these suppliers:

C.A.R. Services Ltd: A supplier of railway rolling stock & Electrical Power Supply Equipment

Railserve Directory: A comprehensive directory of links for all things related to railways.

Before CN introduced the RFID-based chassis-rental system in May 2006, it had to dispatch cranes to remove the containers whenever trains rolled into the terminal. The cranes would pick up CN-owned containers from the railcars and place them onto chassis also owned by CN. At that time, the company owned only about 50 percent of the cargo containers on a typical train. The cranes would place the other containers either onto their respective owners’ chassis or, if none were available, into storage and charge the shippers a per diem for this service. In some cases, if storage areas were filled up, the terminal would need to lift the containers temporarily onto CN chassis until an appropriate chassis or storage spot became available. This would cost the terminal time and money without contributing to its productivity.

CN knew the only way shippers would accept a move to a chassis-rental pool—in which all containers would be placed on CN-owned chassis and shippers would pay fees for the use of the chassis—was if it improved the turnaround time needed to unload containers and move them onto a chassis and out of the terminal more efficiently. To that end, CN needed to find a reliable means of identifying each chassis, associating it with the company renting it, and recording its return to the facility. In addition, CN required a reliable means of associating the chassis with the renter, to avoid losing the $20,000-plus pieces of equipment to theft.

Benmiloud says he knew a manual system would not work. One reason for his skepticism was the expectation that the act of manually entering data was prone to too many errors. In addition, the ID number, painted on an I-beam running along each chassis, was not always easy to see—inclement weather and other factors sometimes resulted in terminal personnel not always being able to read it easily.

Therefore, the company turned to Bell Canada, which worked with Staples Business Depot last year to deploy an RFID product-tracking pilot test (see Staples Business Depot Sees Big Benefits From RFID Test), to help design an RFID solution for identifying the chassis. Bell Canada brought RFID hardware provider Symbol Technologies and RFID solutions provider Shipcom Wireless into the project.

CN initiated a pilot program last winter, which it rolled out across its Brampton facility this past May. Symbol provided a rugged, large-form-factor EPC Gen 2 passive Cargo tag—which, at that time, was still in development, but which Symbol has just released—and worked with Bell Canada and CN to determine how best to mount the tag onto the chassis, and where to position readers and antennas to read the tag as the chassis moves into and out of the terminal. Symbol also worked with Bell Canada to ensure consistent linkages between the readers and the Shipcom middleware, which would be installed not onsite, but at a main IT center CN operates 400 miles away, in Montreal.

The Symbol tag is designed for a maximum read range, with a large internal antenna and an aluminum backing designed to boost that range once the tag is mounted onto a metal object. The tag is consistently readable from up to 40 feet, says Chris Schaefer, Symbol’s director of RFID product marketing—though for the chassis pool, the system reads the tag at a much closer range. The cargo tag comes with four mounting holes, but rather than drill into the I-beam and potentially undermine its strength, CN opted instead to weld a mounting bracket on each chassis, then mount the tag onto the bracket. Using a handheld Symbol MC9060-G RFID computer, workers encoded the chassis ID to each tag. The extreme temperatures, shock and vibrations to which the tags have been exposed since being put into use have not had any detrimental impacts on their performance thus far, says Benmiloud.

As workers drive the trucks out of the yard, Symbol XR400 readers, mounted inside protective boxes located next to each of nine exit lanes in the terminal, read the tags and send their data to Shipcom middleware. The middleware sends the chassis number to a computer inside the gatehouse, where it automatically appears in the chassis-number field of a chassis-rental form. The gatehouse operator then views a video screen linked to cameras that pick up the ID numbers marked on the containers), keys in the proper container number and sends the complete rental form, including the date and time of rental, to CN’s back-end chassis rental and billing systems. When the rental chassis returns to the yard, interrogators posted around the entrance gates read its tag and send the ID and the date and time of return to the middleware. The middleware transmits it to the back-end system, which marks the chassis as returned and completes the billing process.

While CN did not previously rent chassis to shippers, it did send many out of the terminal each day with CN trucks. Keeping track of those chassis was difficult; a gatehouse worker unable to see the ID painted on a chassis’ I-beam clearly might fail to record it as the truck left the facility. Since CN often did not know where all of its chassis were at any given time, the Brampton facility needed to replace missing chassis on a regular basis. At times, more than 100 chassis could be unaccounted for, says Benmiloud.

Today, the company can account for nearly all its chassis at all times. As such, it has been able to avoid buying new chassis, and to reduce the size of its chassis inventory. This, Benmiloud says—combined with revenue generated by the chassis pool and a billing system markedly more reliable and accurate than the one it had used for storage fees before developing the pool—has enabled CN to earn a return on its RFID investment approaching C$500,000.

More importantly, says Benmiloud, CN’s intermodal customers are more satisfied because the streamlined transfers of cargo containers from rail to truck and out of the terminal gates have led to more on-time shipments. In addition, its customers no longer worry about inaccurate bills.

“Customers used to have resources dedicated to checking our billing,” says Benmiloud. “Now they don’t want to do that.”

In the future, CN would like to replicate this chassis-pool rental system at its other intermodal facilities throughout Canada (the company operates a total of nine) and is also looking to expand the use of RFID at its Brampton terminal. Tagging the containers and placing readers on the cranes that lift them would enable CN to improve its method of tracking its customers’ incoming and outgoing shipments. Benmiloud says the company is presently considering security applications based on the RFID system.