The Southern Railway gave the designation 2-NOL to the electric multiple unit

Electric multiple unit

An electric multiple unit or EMU is a multiple unit train consisting of self-propelled carriages, using electricity as the motive power. An EMU requires no separate locomotive, as electric traction motors are incorporated within one or a number of the carriages...

s built during the 1930s from old London and South Western Railway

London and South Western Railway

The London and South Western Railway was a railway company in England from 1838 to 1922. Its network extended from London to Plymouth via Salisbury and Exeter, with branches to Ilfracombe and Padstow and via Southampton to Bournemouth and Weymouth. It also had many routes connecting towns in...

 carriage bodies on new underframes. None of these units survived long enough in British Rail

British Rail

British Railways , which from 1965 traded as British Rail, was the operator of most of the rail transport in Great Britain between 1948 and 1997. It was formed from the nationalisation of the "Big Four" British railway companies and lasted until the gradual privatisation of British Rail, in stages...

 ownership to be allocated a TOPS

TOPS

Total Operations Processing System, or TOPS, is a computer system for managing the locomotives and rolling stock owned by a rail system...

 class.

Construction

The 2-NOL (2-car NO Lavatory stock, numbers 1813–1890) units were built in 1934–1936 by taking former LSWR carriage bodies, lengthening them, and placing them on new underframes. They were intended for use on slow services on the South Coast and in South London.

Formations

Initial formations of these units were as follows (carriages were not necessarily formed in numerical order):

Unit Numbers	DMBT	DTC
1813–1823	9861–9871	9940–9950
1824–1862	9872–9910	9961–9999
1863–1882	8596–8615	9920–9939
1883–1890	9781–9788	9913–9919

Withdrawal

The majority of these units were withdrawn in the late-1950s, when the old bodies were scrapped and the underframes were re-used for new 2-EPB

British Rail Class 416

British Rail Class 416 electric multiple units were built between 1953 and 1956. They were intended for inner suburban passenger services on London's Southern Electric network...

 and 2-HAP

British Rail Class 414

The British Rail Class 414 electric multiple units were built between 1956 and 1963.209 of these two car units were built to two similar sub-classes. The first batch of thirty-six units were built on the underframes of older SR Class 2Nol units, and numbered in the range 5601-5636...

units. There remained 31 units in stock in the Summer of 1959, but they had all been withdrawn by late 1960.