When war was declared in 1914, there were in the British Army just 45 men allocated to staff ambulance trains. None of the trains was purpose-built and there were no female nurses allocated to them. This lack of purpose-built vehicles was a consequence of vacillation by the War Railway Council, which in 1905 had considered that such coaches ought to be built, but could find no-one prepared to meet the cost of construction. As early as 1898, the Birmingham Carriage & Wagon Co had designed and built a well-equipped train of corridor stock used in South Africa during the second Boer War of 1899/1902. It was paid for by a fund organised by one of Queen Victoria's daughters and was consequently known as the Princess Christian Hospital Train, but it had been destroyed in that war.
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