Were there ever any special prisoner carriages used in Britain?

If needed first class compartments would be used for prisoner & escort moves. From memory, the one second/standard class compartment in refurbished CEP and BEP units was to first class dimensions. It was downgraded to increase the number of standard class seats on each unit.

Cheers, Neil

 

That tends to suggest a very high number of prisoner moves and/or somebody else paid.

 

There are quite a lot of prisons in the South East that are/were close to railway stations - The Verne (Weymouth), Fratton, Brixton, Reading, Sheppy, Wandsworth, Feltham (don't walk under the windows), Send, Maidstone, Lewes, Winchester, so my guess is that such moves would have been pretty frequent.

 

Dorchester

 

Not used in Britain but built by the Gloucester Railway Carriage and Wagon Co. for transporting prisoners to Siberia in Imperial Russia.

The third class carriages used on the Great Western in the 1840s looked just as grim!