About 2-Hal

Southern Region/ BRs 2-HAL

The Southern Railway built 92 of these two-car, outer-suburban electric multiple units at Eastleigh between 1938 & 1940; they were numbered 2601 – 2692. The first 76 of these were constructed for the Medway electrification, whilst the last 16 were required for electrification of the Reading Line. Each unit consisted of a Motor Brake Third (Motor Brake Second from 1956), and a Driving Trailer Composite coach.


	The units were successors to the 2-BIL units which had been built durng the previous four years; ‘BIL’ stood for ‘bi-lavatory’ – i.e. there were two lavatories, one per coach. Like the 2-BILs, the 2-HALs had no corridor connection between coaches but with only a single lavatory per unit, only half of the passsengers had access to it; thus ‘HAL’ = ‘half a lavatory’ !

The 2-HAL’s were designed by the Southern Railway’s Chief Mechanical Engineer, Oliver Bulleid and were constructed with wooden frames and steel panels. They were configured to maximise capacity (a total of 32 1st and 102 3rd class seats per unit) and featured uncomfortable bench-like seats. Each unit was powered by 2 x 275h.p. motors with electro-pneumatic control gear, mounted beneath the underframe.

Livery when built was standard Southern dark green without lining; later this was supercede by BR(S) green, followed by the

addition of small yellow warning panels front & rear – with black inverted triangle at the brake van end. Later still they were to appear in standard BR corporate rail blue livery with all yellow ends, and some units were eventually re-formed & re-numbered for departmental use. None of the 2-HALs was preserved.

In later life the 2-HAL’s could be found all over the Southern & BR(S) electrified network; in 1971 6 withdrawn units were stripped of all seating and re-classified as 2-PAN (‘Parcels & Newspapers’) for use on pre-Christmas postal specials

Seven more 2-HAL units were built after the end of World War Two (Nos. 2693 – 2699, delivered in 1948), however, these had a revised body shape and are not the subject of the Electrifying Trains model.