Liverish

By the 1950s, things were getting very difficult on the Nationalised British Railways.


A desperate shortage of cleaners -- and a declining number of people willing to undertake such arduous and filthy work -- meant that even crack Pacific express engines were turned out like this, with rust and stains all over:


Underneath the grime that locomotive is actually green.

Even districts that were renowned for the pride they took in turning-out gleaming locomotives struggled -- here an Eastern Region "Claud Hamilton" pulls out of Melton Constable, the shiny black engine looking a little the worse for wear:


The basic problem, of course, is that a steam railway is fundamentally filthy -- coal dust, smoke, smuts, oily steam spray...


Even the crack expresses looked decidedly weather-beaten towards the end of their turns:


While the more lowly freight (and occasional mixed traffic) engines like this Q1 were left to manage as best they could, limescale, leaks and rust seemingly holding the engine together.


The introduction of diesel-electric locomotives towards the end of the 1950s offered an opportunity for a fresh start -- keeping the striking maroon carriages, but introducing a new green livery for locomotives.

There wasn't a single, all-over look applied in the same way to everything: the livery of each type of locomotive was individually designed, and many (like this Class 47) were liveried in two-tone green:


Conversely, this Class 31 was painted in all-over green but with two horizontal stripes of palest duck-egg blue to relieve the look:


While this Class 20 had all-over green and a pale grey roof:


Whereas this delightful, brand-new Class 37 is in unrelieved all-over green, the subtle curves of its body providing the relief:


The rest of this post is a photographic celebration of those green diesel-electrics:








I love this livery, and it survived until the mid-1960s.

At that time, a startlingly new look was devised -- one of the first modern corporate identity programmes, worked-out by those geniuses in the Design Research Unit. The shock of the blue must have been almost overwhelming:



The main colour -- originally known as Monastral Blue, but subsequently much better-known as simply Rail Blue -- was leavened with Pearl Grey, the two separated by a thin white line. The double arrow symbol was introduced at the same time, replacing the old "ferret and wheel" emblem.


And at roughly the same time, the brand-name Inter-City was adopted for all the express, long-haul routes (and subsequently copied by many other national railway systems many of whom, ironically, continue to use it today, long after it has disappeared from Britain's stupidly fragmented railway system):


And now I need to go and lie down, overcome with nostalgia for a happier, simpler time...