BR Blue: Scenes from the British Rail Corporate Image Era

The British Rail corporate image and its Rail Blue livery was one of the longest-lived colour schemes carried by the trains of Britain in the forty-eight-year life of the nationalised railway network. Launched in 1965, after Beeching, the then new corporate image was an attempt by the BR design panel to raise the profile of the railway system countrywide and to sweep away the dull steam-era image as the swinging sixties got underway. By the mid-1970s, virtually all BR locomotives and multiple units were carrying Rail Blue livery, while most of the passenger coaches were in matching blue/grey. As the British Rail network was sectorised from the late 1980s in preparation for eventual privatisation, new bold, bright livery schemes for the fleet swept away the familiar, but by then somewhat jaded BR image. The BR blue era is now looked upon with affection as a golden age when the system was operated by an immense variety of locomotives and rolling stock, all now part of history in the same way that the steam era was viewed when the BR blue era ruled on Britain’s railways.