thumb|right|[[British Railways "standard" brake van]]
Brake van and guard's van are terms used mainly in the UK, Ireland, Australia, and India for a railway vehicle equipped with a hand brake which can be applied by the guard. The equivalent North American term is caboose, but a British brake van and an American caboose are very different in appearance and use. A brake van usually has only four wheels, while a caboose usually has bogies. Further, cabooses are not used to provide braking on a train, but instead once served as a mobile office for the conductor and the brakemen who helped monitor the train. German railways employed brakeman's cabins that were combined into other cars.
Many British freight trains formerly had no continuous brake, so the only available brakes were those on the locomotive and the brake van. Because of this shortage of brake power, the speed was restricted to . The brake van was marshalled at the rear of the train so both portions of the train could be brought to a stand in the event of a coupling breaking.
When freight trains were fitted with continuous braking, brake vans lost their importance and were discontinued by many railways. However, they still operate on some important railways, such as Indian Railways, as well as on heritage railways.
Origin
Railways were a formalised development of industrial tramways, which, on occasion, had to add braking capacity by attaching an empty truck to the rear of a group of tramcars. This allowed the "locomotive" — often a cableway powered by a steam engine at the surface — to operate both safely and, more importantly, at higher speed.
The first railways, such as the pioneering Liverpool and Manchester Railway of 1830, used a version of the tramway buffer-and-chain coupling, termed a screw coupling. Vehicles are coupled by hand using a hook and links with a turnbuckle-like device that draws the vehicles together. Vehicles have buffers, one at each corner on the ends, which are pulled together and compressed by the coupling device. With no continuous brake across the entire train, Designed for high-speed operation on milk and parcels trains rather than stopping power, they had a lengthened cabin. Still, they did not cover the entire twin-bogie chassis.
Equipment and Furniture
Equipment carried aboard the brake van, which had to be checked by the guard before the train's departure, consisted of:
- A shunting pole: a wooden pole about 6 feet long with a twisted hook on the end, which was used to couple and uncouple 3-link and instanter couplings without the guard having to position himself dangerously in between the vehicles,
- At least 2 "sprags": A section of wood designed to be shoved into gaps in the side of a railway wagon wheel, that physically prevents the wheel from rotating, effectively immobilizing a wagon. They were often used during shunting operations, or when wagons needed to be detached from a train as a means to prevent runaways.
- Brake stick: similar in shape to a square-ended baseball bat, and used to lever down the handbrakes of wagons by placing it under the solebar and applying downward pressure.
- Track circuit clips: A pair of metal spring clips connected by a wire used on lines with track circuits to indicate to the signalman that a train is occupying that section. They would be used in the event of an accident in which other running lines were fouled, and trains on them had to be stopped as a matter of great urgency.
- A set of red and green signalling flags,
In the years immediately before that, brake vans were deemed necessary only by the HM Railway Inspectorate or Network Rail in certain special cases, for example, on trains with unusual cargoes or on track maintenance trains.
The nearest equivalent to a brake van still in use on main-line British railways is the driving van trailer (DVT), which is used on locomotive-hauled trains to control the locomotive from the other end of the train in a push-pull configuration, removing the need for the locomotive to run around its train at termini. Although the DVT has braking capability of its own, this is incidental, as the vehicle's primary purpose is to allow the train to be driven from the opposite end to the locomotive and to provide accommodation for bulky luggage.
Brake vans are still a common sight on many heritage railways.