The beauty of Transportation

The decline and fall of the rail blue empire (British Railways’ corporate identity 1964-1986, part 2) by dwtransportwriting British Rail’s rail blue corporate identity was one of the most successful applied to any British transport company in the 20th Century, but by the late 1980s it had been all but wiped out. The story of its decline and fall is directly and inversely related to the rising confidence of British Rail and its operating sectors themselves. Its success, in essence, became its undoing. If asked to recall British Rail as a nationalised operator, most British people will eventually describe blue and grey trains, and the double arrow logo, all part of the rail-blue corporate identity developed by Design Research Unit in the mid-1960s, as we saw last week. So strongly did that corporate identity imprint into the national consciousness that it has over-written the earlier corporate identities used by British Railways (which we looked at here), and remains more memorable than many of the later British Rail corporate identities for its subsidiary business sectors, and many of the post-privatisation corporate identities developed for train operators. Perhaps the zenith of British Rail’s corporate identity was on its fleet of High Speed Trains, introduced from 1976. With their wedge-shaped ends, the InterCity 125s were the product British Rail’s corporate identity could have been made for. They remain one of just a handful of transport vehicles which have become icons in their own right, recognisable outside the transport cognoscenti. The sharp angles of the double arrow logo perfectly complemented the raked ends of the InterCity 125, and the look was enhanced by extending the safety-yellow front end back along the bodyside in a stripe which ended at an angle matching the nosecone of the train. By putting it on the path to profitability, this was the train that saved British Rail’s InterCity business, and probably, by extension, British Rail itself. Beeching might have wanted British Rail to look modern with its new corporate image, but it took until the InterCity 125 before it had a truly modern train to match. An InterCity 125 at Old Royston in 1982. Photo by John Rinder [CC BY-SA 2.0], via Wikimedia Commons It transformed British Rail’s image almost instantly. Suddenly, instead of a distress purchase, intercity train travel was an attractive alternative to driving a car. Thanks to their modern image, and a top speed of some 15-25mph faster than previous express trains, allowing journey times to be slashed, the InterCity 125s created substantial passenger growth. This was a virtually unheard-of concept on British Rail at the time, with large main line electrification schemes the only other projects which had delivered sizeable boosts in patronage. The joy of the Intercity 125 for British Rail was that it was diesel powered, so it could be widely deployed. This was very useful given that electrification was proceeding at a snail's pace, if indeed even that fast. Before long the InterCity 125s were operating from London to Wales, the west country, the north east and the Pennines. Much of the rest of British Rail's network might still have been slow, draughty and generally uncomfortable, not to mention clearly lacking in investment (as anyone who caught an old, rattling, diesel train at a slowly decaying station in the so-called ‘Provincial’ service areas could tell you) but the InterCity 125s defined British Rail’s public image and for the first time gave it real confidence going forward. British Railways’ 1950s and 1960s lions and wheel heraldic emblems, regional variations, and steam train-inspired carriage colours exemplified its muddled thinking and failure to get to grips with the post-war world. By the late 1970s, British Rail’s double-arrow-blue-and-grey corporate identity summed it up, too. This was a cohesive company with a good degree of confidence about what it was doing, certainly in its InterCity business. The corporate identity was unfussy, almost stark, and that was British Rail too. It would get you to where you were going, most of the time anyway. But it wasn’t exactly seductive or luxurious. The preponderance of dark blue on the outside of trains, melamine fittings inside, and the acres of dark-coloured polyester uniforms sported by staff, saw to that. That, however, was almost the point. British Rail was still living down the financial fiasco of the Modernisation Plan, and was trying to present a sober, financially responsible image, at which it was beginning to succeed. The catering was dire (I know it became a standing joke, but unless you were in the restaurant car of an InterCity train it was, it truly was), customer service was rarely better than poor-to-average, and there was never enough capacity on busy commuter routes because the government hated giving British Rail any money in case it wasted it (hence also the slow progress on electrification), but British Rail and its corporate identity were rapidly gaining in confidence. In 1978 the first major revision to the corporate image was unveiled, when locomotives began receiving the “large logo” version of the British Rail livery. This featured a full height version of the double arrow logo. Suddenly, British Rail had become proud enough of itself that it wanted to emblazon the logo which represented the company as large as it possibly could. A Class 50 locomotive painted in British Rail's "large logo" version of its corporate livery. This photo was take in 1990, by which time the locomotive has begun to look quite scruffy. Photo by Daniel Wright [CC BY-NC-ND 2.0] via this flickr page Yet this was the rail blue corporate identity’s last hurrah. In the same year, InterCity’s prototype Advanced Passenger Trains (APTs) entered service. Thanks to InterCity’s success with the InterCity 125 (even though the design teams of the two trains were rivals) it was in a strong enough position to demand that the Advanced Passenger Trains break away from the long-established rail blue corporate identity and sport a brand new livery of dark and light grey, separated by red and white stripes. It was a complete departure from rail blue and grey, although (for now) the double arrow logo was retained in the design. The new livery worn by the APT, here shown on its power cars. Image by Emoscopes (Self made using Corel Photo-Paint 6.0) [CC BY-SA 2.5], via Wikimedia Commons There had actually been variations to the standard British Rail corporate image from the beginning. Pullman coaches wore a reversed version of the blue and grey colours (grey bodies, blue around the windows), a smart colour scheme also employed later on the prototype High Speed Train and the experimental APT (not to be confused with the later prototype APTs referred to above). From the mid-1970s, refurbished diesel trains on provincial services had been painted white with a rail blue stripe. A refurbished Class 101 diesel train in 1978 at Edinburgh Haymarket. It's in remarkably clean condition. This colour scheme was more usually seen looking rather greyer... Photo by Steve Jones [CC BY-NC-ND 2.0] via this flickr page In fact this was a particularly stupid colour scheme given that diesel trains make themselves dirty through exhaust fumes, and British Rail’s cleaning regime was diffident at best, especially for provincial trains. Nevertheless, there was still a strong link to the rail blue corporate identity in all these variations. The new InterCity corporate identity was a much more radical break from the standard corporate image. Ironically, British Rail’s corporate identity had been championed by its 1961-1965 chairman Dr Richard Beeching to give the company a modern image to coalesce around, to encourage it to behave in a more modern way, and to look to the future with confidence. Now the InterCity sector had become so confident that it saw that very same corporate image as a reminder of the past, something it wanted to leave behind along with its associations of drabness and indifferent customer service, not to mention the shocking industrial relations problems and strikes from which British Rail suffered periodically during the rail blue era. These had been particularly bad just before the introduction of the InterCity 125s, when the prototype version of the InterCity 125 and the experimental APT had both been "blacked" by the railway unions who insisted there should be space in the driving cabs for two drivers; one to drive and the other to, er, make the tea, I suppose. Unfortunately, strikes on various issues continued to plague British Rail subsequently, to a greater or lesser extent, but the introduction of a new InterCity corporate identity looked like a chance for a new start. The APT might have proved a failure as a package of technologies, but its new colours spread to the rest of British Rail’s Intercity train fleet from 1983 after a business relaunch.