Numbering of Railway Coaches
Even a casual traveller or a visitor to a railway station will note that each rail coach has a number printed on it. Usually a 5-digit number, it is not random but follows a pattern and a system. The number is the characteristic of each coach and it is recognised through it.
At present, some of the railway zones on the Indian Railways (IR) use a 5-digit number while others use 6 digits. Along with the number, the zone this coach belongs to is also painted on the coach in both, the Hindi and English languages. Of course, the full name of the zone is not recorded but only the initials. For example, Northern Railway is written as NR, South Eastern as SE, and so on. The East Coast Railway is a bit complicated and is recorded as ECoR, as there is also an East Central Railway (ECR). There is similar abbreviating in the Hindi language.
Now to come to the number itself. The first two digits of the number tell you the year the coach was built. The next 3 digits are the serial number of the coach in the year it was built. For instance, the coach pictured below has the number 15720.
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This means that the coach was built in the year 2015 while 720 is its serial number. This coach is a Guard’s van and its serial number is 720. If the number had been a 6-digit one, the last digit would indicate the number of the Division this coach was based in on the railway zone the coach belonged to. For instance, on the erstwhile Western Railway, which had 8 divisions, Bhavnagar Division was Division No. 8. Thus, a coach based at Bhavnagar would have the 6th digit as 8.
An interesting fall out of this numbering system is that there can be two coaches with the same number. The only difference is that they will be owned by different railway zones. For instance, the coach in the photograph below is also numbered 15720.
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However, this one belongs to the Central Railway (CR) while the one pictured earlier is Western Railway (WR). Other examples can also be seen in the photographs on this page.
You can even have a coach with the number 11111. This means that it was manufactured in the year 2011 and its serial number is 111.
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Another interesting number is 00500. This obviously means that this coach was built in the year 2000 and carries the serial number 500. The number could well have been 00001. Of course, we cannot have a coach with the number 00000.
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Another system worth noting is that the serial numbering is not a simple chronological sequence; it is based on the type of coach also and each year, a series of numbers is allocated to one type of coach. To give you a few examples, first class air-conditioned coaches are allotted the series from 001 to 025, 2-tier air-conditioned coaches are numbered from 026 to 050, 3-tier air-conditioned from 101-150, general coaches from 401 to 600, and so on. There is a similar series allocated to each of the other types of coaches.
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Therefore, the next time you are on a train, note the number of the coach you are travelling in; each number has a story to tell.
Photographs and inputs from Vimlesh Chandra. He is a mechanical engineer posted on the Western Railway zone of the Indian Railways. He has been listed in the Limca Book of Records for having a collection of more than 300 photographs of rail coaches with interesting numbers. The person seen in one of the photographs is Vimlesh himself.