When did PA announcements start?

[satisnek]

How were the connections between carriages for the PA done initially?

Good question. I would guess that it would have been a 100V speaker line carried by dedicated cabling, as used by a number of heritage railways today (I've seen everything from professionally-installed conduit and heavy-duty jumper cable and connectors to bits of wire strung through gangway connections!). Audio line level distributed to individual amplifiers in each vehicle (as per the Ripper system, using the lighting control lines) would have been an expensive option with early transistors and stupidly expensive using valve technology.

 

[70014IronDuke]

Station announcements were always a thing for me. But for me on train announcements came with Mk2 carriages. Not sure the early ones were fitted or we had to wait for the air con ones. There was nothing on modernisation plan DMU's.
Did the XP64 coaches have PA. would they have been the first?

I think the PA systems came in with Mk2Ds or 2Es. I was the assistant once on a test run with a colleague from Notthingham. We had to go to Tamworth, and catch the one up morning express stoping there to test the system, so I think it must have been fairly new then. I think this must have been summer 72. I thought the system was switched off and said some nonsense like "allo, allo, allo, what you doin' 'ere then Steven?" - only to find it had gone through the train. Fortunately I didn't say anything more obnoxious

 

[driver9000]

At Lancaster many of the announcements are still manual, possibly because virtually everything is running late by the time it gets there.

Interestingly during the 80s and 90s Lancaster had an automated announcer. It has the standard automatic one now but it seems to have fallen out of favour....same at Carlisle.