"Come Back B.R., All Is Forgiven"Part 1 - FreightBy Chris Dorrell Taken from the Folkestone Model Railway Club "Fishplate" magazine November/December 1998.
There's a phrase you don't here very often, although you might in the future with the way the present privatised companies are performing. However, I'm not here to write about privatisation but the various liveries now prevailing, which could well change again before I'm finished writing this small series of articles. Yes, B.R. was not necessarily the best train service provider but at least modelling the small number of liveries was easier. In this series of articles I will be dealing with the pre-privatisation liveries through to the present and ever changing liveries, with pictures to accompany them, I hope. I will also be using the same livery codes that we in the "modern image" section of the club have been using for the past eight years or so on our computerised stock records (not using a P.C. I might add!). As a summary: good old B.R. from 1965 had Rail Blue (BLU) for locomotives and multiple units until the latter were refurbished with the impractical white with a blue stripe livery (WHB), which was replaced with Blue & Grey (BLG) already used on coaches. Apart from a few special liveries for the odd special occasion, such as the Queens Silver Jubilee in 1977, the next biggest revolution in B.R. liveries was Large Logo Blue (LLB) - "Big Deal!" [Photo 1]. 
Photo 1. 50050 at Bournemouth. Large Logo Blue. Photo: Chris Dorrell Around 1983 B.R decided it would be more business-like and would carry out one of it's all too many re-organisations, into business sectors. This gave the head of each sector the opportunity of introducing a new livery. At first this new breed of liveries were not too controversial. As I will be reviewing freight liveries in this article we shall start with the first Rail Freight Livery (RF1) [Photo 2]. This was obviously a bit too boring for them so they added a red stripe at the sole bar level (RF2); this livery first appeared on the class 58's. 
Photo 2. (unidentified) class 47 at Toton, in the first Rail Freight livery. Photo: Chris Dorrell With most of the freight locos painted in either RF1 or RF2 some bright spark decided to have a re-organisation again. Rail Freight was now split into sub-sectors. Each, as you can guess, needed to have their own identity, and their own livery. The basis of the sub-sector livery was two-tone grey with identity markings on top. The first, and shortest lived, of these to appear was Rail Freight General (RFG) and appeared on a few class 86 electric locos. This was followed by Rail Freight Coal (RFG) [Photo 3], Rail Freight Construction (RFT), Rail Freight Petroleum (RFP), Rail Freight Metals (RFM) and finally Rail Freight Distribution (RFD). Some locos could not decide which sub-sector they were in and so only had the two-tone grey without logos and this was labelled (by us) as Rail Freight Unspecified (RFU). 
Photo 3. 26004 at Toton. Rail Freight Coal. Photo: Chris Dorrell Before privatisation could take full hold on the railways, and to make the freight sectors more commercially attractive to potential buyers, the freight sectors were re-organised again, but on geographical areas with a few exceptions. Firstly, Rail Freight Distribution, which was almost untouched so far, had the freightliner business hived off to become Freightliner Ltd., and of course with this they introduced a new livery based once again on the two-tone grey as used in the sector liveries, but with a red triangle at one end (FRL). This has recently been up dated into a green and yellow design (FRR) [Photo 4] which has so far appeared on a class 86 (as shown) and the re-engined class 47's which have been re-classified as class 57. 
Photo 4. 86631 at Toton. Freightliner Ltd. Photo: Chris Dorrell Around the same time as the re-organisation of the other sub-sectors, Rail Freight Distribution were operating freight trains through the Channel Tunnel, so they sneaked in another new livery to go on their class 47's which dealt with channel tunnel work (RFX) [Photo5]. The livery proved popular and so it was extended to appear on class 86's and 90's. 
Photo 5. 47525 at Tinsley. Railfreight Distribution. Photo: Chris Dorrell The other sectors were amalgamated into three freight companies and these became Mainline Freight, Trans-rail Freight and Loadhaul Freight. Initially they all put their logos onto the original two-tone grey livery (RML [Photo6] / RTR / RLH) and in some cases onto other liveries. Trans-rail put their logos onto the yellow & grey (CIV) civil link scheme (CTR). 
Photo 6. 58004 at Toton. Mainline Freight. Photo: Chris Dorrell Apart from Trans-rail the other two companies did just about come up with their own liveries before all three were sold to the same company. These were Loadhaul's Orange & Black Livery (LHF) [Photo7] and Mainline's Blue & Silver Livery (MLF). 
Photo 7. 37884 at Eastleigh. Loadhaul's Orange and Black livery. Photo: Chris Dorrell When the three freight companies became one and became EWS (English, Welsh & Scottish Railways) who had already taken over Rail Express Systems, a new livery was bound to appear. This livery (EWS) [Photo8] was later to alter again with the loss of the ampersand. Newer changes include a Royal Train version for locos 47798/47799 (EWY), and a revised version followed for the new class 66's (EWR)[Photo9]. As you can see this is just one company. It has not been around for very long and it has already had four revisions of the basic livery, which is certainly good news for Lima anyway. 
Photo 8. 37707 at Bournemouth. English, Welsh and Scottish Railways. Photo: Chris Dorrell 
Photo 9. 66005 at Toton. Revised EWS livery. Photo: Chris Dorrell Part 2 of this series of articles will deal with Civil Engineers and Private Freight Liveries (apart from EWS and Freightliner of course!) Back to top Back to Folkestone MRC Home Page
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