BAGDContext CSM

Here are some pictures of the Burlington Zephyr diesel unit from the 1940s. The train was exhibited at the World’s Fair and became a symbol of US modernisation…

One of the best graphic bits of the old BR was the Railfreight identity made up of heraldic elements. These had the great benefit of combining colour, scale and consistency across the various bits of industrial infrastructure relating to BRs freight operations.

This is the visual indentity for the Kent Link line designed by Eddie Pond. Here’s the link to our page about Eddie Pond’s posters and artwork…

http://www.rennart.co.uk/pond.html

Lovely

Here are some pictures of exercises is styling the Deltic locos of the late 1950s. The pictures are from David Lawrence’s new book about BR design. The pictures show the classic Deltic “fist,” and a couple of experiments in a more self-consciously American contemporary style.

Here’s a picture of Folkestone railway station from David Lawrence’s new book about BR design. It turns out that Folkestone Central (1961), where I catch the train every morning, is an example of a transitional architectural style of station between the Festival style of 1951 and the more obviously contemporary…I was intrigued to find that Coventry station was also redeveloped in this style.

Euston is, I guess, the most famous of these kinds of station. I’ve posted about Euston before, here

Railway Propylaeum – The Euston Arch

I was born in Coventry, and have lived most of my adult life in Folkestone. Must be the stations.

Here’s a new book by David Lawrence about design and British Railways…The book’s published by Ian Allen, the railway and transport publishers. Actually, the presentation of the book isn’t too bad.

I’ve had a quick look through the book. It seems quite good at describing the process of design within an organisation such as BR. It’s worth noting that, in 1946, when BR was formed it would have been one of the biggest organisations in the UK.

I don’t think nationalisation would have been possible before WW2, The scale of operations would have been too big for the available IT. The Big Four regional groups of railways were effectively a quarter of the size of BR.

Quite nice…combining the glamour and the big machine

Nice.