Air Conditioned Car

An air-conditioned passenger car at the Eveleigh Paint Shop sits on a workshop track with its roof-mounted condenser units visible from the side. The condensers are housed in raised steel hoods running along the centre of the roof, each unit feeding a section of the carriage below. Vents along the inside of the roof carry the cooled air into the passenger compartment. The body is painted in a stainless-and-grey interstate livery, breaking from the chocolate-and-cream of the suburban fleet. The carriage has continuous side fluting along the lower body panels, the kind of pattern that came in with the postwar stainless-steel stock. Double-leaf sliding doors at the end vestibules.

Air-conditioning came to the NSW long-distance passenger fleet in the postwar decades as a comfort upgrade over the earlier non-conditioned interstate cars. The cooling equipment was powered by the on-board generators in the consist's power van or by direct electrical connection from the locomotive on services that ran behind electrically-powered engines. The carriage in this photograph is from the long-distance fleet now held at the Eveleigh Paint Shop. Its working life ended when the long-distance NSW services were rationalised through the 1980s and 1990s, and it is now part of the Historic Electric Traction heritage holdings.