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1. Diesel railcar which also has its own heating unit. - You're not thinking of generator vans/coaches by any chance used to provide heating or lighting to passenger carriages when the locomotive itself was not so equipped? But these were always unpowered units - in the sense that they had no traction to their own wheels. As far as I know they were very rare in the UK - though not in Ireland and other countries.
2. Railcar - I would say this is the correct and more elegant term for a single car multiple unit. Motor coach/motor car sound like road vehicles. Bubblecar is just a nickname.
3. Multiple heading v. multiple traction - which is better? Double headed (or triple-or even quadruple-headed) would be the best terms I would venture. You might need to use terms like multiple-traction in the US where there can be up to ten locos on a train and not all of them at the head end.
4. Are the terms 'hauled', 'towed' and 'pulled' interchangeable? - 'Hauled' and 'pulled' sound like normal operation; towed suggests to me rescue of a breakdown or movement of a 'dead' loco.
5.Banking/pushing - banking/banker has always been the UK term; I've never heard pusher used by railwaymen though I'm sure it's the term that would spring to mind for most lay people. In the US they say helping/helper, I think.
6. A locomotive that recovers a train from the track - recovery locomotive, breakdown locomotive or emergency locomotive? Historically, I don't think there were locos in the UK specifically dedicated to recovery of breakdowns. The so-called 'Thunderbird' is a relatively recent development. There would of course been spare locos/links at various motive power depots.
7. The name for a trackside winch unit (housed in a cabinet) which is used to manually operate switches/section insulators on an overhead line (may be obsolete technololgy, I'm not sure).
Not heard of this myself. It sounds a little bit like the devices used to tension overhead wires but these were simple weights on pulleys rather than switches.
Would there have been a need to separately switch out different electrical sections on the early overhead electrification schemes such as the Brighton Line in the 1920s or the Woodhead Route in the 1940s/50s? Perhaps, but I don't think so.
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