Brakevans

Brake or break vans?
IIR I read, it may have been Tom, saying that in early years they were actually known as break vans?
There's a conversation on the Swanage Facebook site about the same thing
Steve

 

No, I have seen the term "break" used before in relation to these vehicles, usually in old literature.

 

“Break” was definitely used in the 19th century. (The SER had “Goods Break” on their vans). It seems to have fallen out of use as a spelling by the early years of the twentieth century.

An etymological hunch: we still use the phrase “to break your stride” to mean to slow down. (Rather than “brake your stride”). I suspect originally it would relate to horse-drawn vehicles that would break their pace, from which a van designed to slow a train would break (the pace) of the train. Somewhat later, the sense passed from a passive verb (break) to an active one (brake), i.e. the meaning changes from a description of what happens to a description of the action that makes it happen.

Tom

 

Might that term be due to the fact that if a coupling broke in an unfitted train then the only means of stopping the broken part of the train was the guard in the end van....if the train breaks then the van brakes are used?

 

Break is perfectly acceptable as where else can you go for your sandwiches when out on a PW job on the track.

 

Rather like "shew/shewn" for "show/shown", although Pye (the radio/TV manufacturer) persisted with the former until the 1950s...

 

I’ve always understood “break stride” to refer to the pattern of the stride, not necessarily the pace of it - in the same way that marching troops are instructed to break step on some bridges.


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

 

This is now due be cut up this weekend 17th 18th Feb

 

Until the arrival of the restored / replicated NSR23, the Knotty Heritage Train used a suitably repainted Shark Brakevan ...

 

That sounds pretty much right. Also, the whole question of correct spelling used to be much less observed in the nineteenth century - particularly among working class folk and engineers who would probably have been less fussed about spelling of everyday words.