Gresley Coach Roof Tank Pipes

[TheSignalEngineer]

I'm just preparing two donors for some conversions. They are the modern Hornby scale length ones.

I noticed when I started doing the tops that the Sleeping Car has external pipes to the roof tank filler whereas the FK and others I have looked at have the pipes entering the end just below roof level. 

 

From photos I have and around the web there doesn't seem to be any pattern except that late pictures including preserved examples seem to have internal pipes. Around 1960 I have found both types in the same train.

 

Any LNER experts able to give a steer on this question?

 

Thanks for reading.

[Wickham Green]

On the Southern, end filler pipes first appeared on Bulleid's coaches and were retro-fitted to Maunsells and Pullmans from the late forties. It COULD be that your external type fillers were, similarly, retro-fits of coaches which started out with top-fill only ? [ OVSB would have been involved with Gresley's coaches of course - but I'm not trying to imply any significance with the filler pipes.] 

[TheSignalEngineer]

Possible connection there, Bulleid was indeed Gresley's C&W man in LNER days.

 

Doing a quick unscientific trawl through the internet and a couple of books the very early GNR Gresleys seem possibly to be top fill only. New builds / rebuilds up to the late 1930s mostly seem to have roof pipes, for instance a 58' Buffet Car rebuilt in 1933 from a GNR coach of 1913 pictured at New Street in 1960. An early picture of the 1938 Hook Continental stock shows no roof pipes.

 

I've just found two pictures of the BTO diagram I am doing running in the early 1960s without roof pipes so I am going to work to those.