THE PASSING OF THE "DANDY"
THERE was nothing in Bradshaw, nor anything on the railway ticket to Port Carlisle, to suggest peculiar means of locomotion; we noted that we had to change at Drumburgh, that was all. But when we alighted at that busy junction, there was the dandy, with its locomotive skewed across the metals, gazing with equine contemplation at its rival on the Silloth line. The dandy is a survival—a railway carriage drawn by a horse, but distinctly a railway carriage and not a tram. In general shape, colour, and wheels. as also in its windows, door, ventilator. and even door handle, it is a railway carriage, and its inscription—"Port Carlisle. N.B.R. No. I."—suggests its antiquity; was it the first coach built by the North British?
But there is something more than ordinary railway rolling-stock about the dandy, for at either end is a wide driving seat with a neatly curved splash-board, whilst along the sides the ordinary double step is transformed into a row of seats; above all is the power, the patient horse, ready to pull this strange conveyance along the two and a half miles of normal gauge line to Port Carlisle. The dandy was built for a horse, not the horse adapted to the dandy.
There were four passengers for the terminus, and one for the porterless station of Glasson, where "the Trains [with a capital T] call when required to take up and set down Passengers," as we read in Bradshaw. What constitutes a Train, and why the capital? The dictionary states: "A continuous line or series of carriages on a
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