Radio-Equipped Trains

Radio Record, Volume VI, Issue 21, 2 December 1932, Page 20

Radio-Equipped Trains

ADIO-HQUIPPED trains are the' latest step taken by the London and North-Wastern Railway for the comfort and entertainment of passengers to and from Scotland. For a smali fee, from July 18 onward, it has been possible for travellers by certain trains to be furnished with headphones to listen to home and foreign broadcasts. The first two BEnglish trains to be equipped in this way leave King’s Cross and Edinburgh respectively at 1.20 p.m. and 2.5 p.m. on week days. The two L.N.B.R. world-famed "Flying Scotsmen" will soon be similarly equipped. In other parts of the world the wireless train has been in operation for some time, and the fact that only four carriages on the L.N.E.R. system are wired suggests that the company is not taking wireless so seriously as other railways do in other countries. The Canadian National Railways, for instance, have had radio installed on all their principal trains for ‘the last nine years, and have developed the idea on a very large scale. One of the features of the Canadian. system is the staffing of wireless trains. As a rule two operators are carried, one to give full-time attention to the receiving set and the other to hire out the headphones up and down the train. This is perhaps the chief weakness on the Edinburgh journey. All the work in connection with tuning, dialling, adjusting faults ‘which may develop en route, selling the headphones, and consulting programmes, is left to one man --one of the dining-car attendants. } Fa