Tuesday Treasures - May 2025

TUESDAY 27 MAY

Corporate Image on the Railways – 2

On 4 April 2023 our Tuesday Treasure blog covered the new BR Staff Uniforms introduced in April 1966 with information drawn from a staff booklet ‘Your New Uniform’ in the Great Western Trust Museum & Archive collection. Today we go back a few years earlier to 1964, when the staff received a striking folded pamphlet with the ‘Double Arrow symbol (white on red background) on its cover and no other wording!

Perhaps that striking emblem spoke for itself as a jolt to staff that things were about to change, and radically. Whilst that pamphlet covered many more areas of change, we chose to illustrate just three, sections, that introduce four topics that have had the most lasting duration and impact.

Illustration No1 has to be that double arrow symbol, not least because its dominant size had deliberate visual impact. It became the new British Railways corporate image, so familiar to us today on all our national railway stations, even after train service privatisation, and is surprisingly over 61 years old. It has certainly proved its worth in surviving all those years and appears to be here for a long while yet.

Illustration No 2 covers two topics. First, rather clever use of varied colours on the letters, brings about the migration from ‘British Railways’ to ‘British Rail. Like the double arrows, this is still in use today, and with our current era smitten by abbreviations, one might argue that it was a trend setter.

That Illustration also introduces the XP64 experimental train carriage stock which led to the migration away from BR Mark 1 stock to Mark 2 and then Mark 3 air conditioned stock. An unexpected and unplanned beneficiary of that evolution has been the heritage railway lines that now rely upon extensive fleets of once-redundant Mark 1 stock.

Illustration No 3 is perhaps the one that had the widest impact, as it affected every single station on the network, public issued documents, and even official headed letters.

First we need to go back much further to April 1948, when after 3 months of Nationalisation, where public notices and handbills had a very functional banner heading of ‘[British Railways (Western Region)] or other Region identity, using those words bounded by simple squared brackets, the ‘totem’ as we today describe it, first appeared. In a very comprehensive internal document of April 1948 was published this new image signage for all stations based largely upon the totem, adopting regional colours.

The text may be small, but under Note 1 we have the perfect example of new era thinking and the consequent dismissive attitudes to old or indeed then, current designs! The ‘totem’ is to be replaced by, we quote:-

“A new, more purposeful symbol. This replaces the obsolete ‘double sausage’ introduced nearly twenty years ago.”

So there it is. For those of us, and there are many, who admire and maybe even own our local station’s totem, we must reclassify it as a ‘double sausage’!! Such are the ways in which new ages claim new ideas, and justify them by trashing the current as ‘obsolete’.

Just as the April 1948 new age nationalised railways’ corporate Image signage rendered obsolete all the Big Four company signage, at significant financial cost to the taxpayer, so of course did the sweeping rebranding of 1964. We can only wonder what the 1964 advocates of change would now think of the auction prices reached for ‘double sausage’ station signs and the many expansive collections of them in museums like the Great Western Trust. We illustrate a Southall totem now in our collection.

The functional but bland 1964 station signage has far less appeal to collectors, and certainly consequently, relatively small financial value in the collector’s market.

In a future blog, based upon the Trust collection, we will return to this broad theme of corporate image, in the era of the original GWR and its contemporary railway companies.

TUESDAY 13 MAY

Railway & Bus Service Integration

The Great Western Trust collection has many examples of the Great Western Railway’s investment into, and very strong belief in, the benefits to the public and industry of integrated – that is organised and timed co-ordination of passenger and freight interchange between Rail and Road and back again.

A busy scene at Brecon station on 14 December 1949

The most striking example of this was the fact that the GWR introduced bus services (they called them road motors) in Cornwall and other counties, rather than extend expensive railway lines to other towns and villages. They were the owners and operators of more buses than even those in London!

Brecon station on 17 September 1962, photograph by P M Gates

Fast forward to 1 January 1948 and railway Nationalisation, and the Labour government’s primary objective was to even extend that ‘integration of transport services’ to embrace canals! Well sadly we all know that things never quite worked out as they had hoped for, and today’s blog shines a light on perhaps the extreme irony of matters when previously well served towns lost all direct railway services before and during the massive reduction of the railway network under Beeching and Marples.

Brecon station on 17 September 1962, showing the attractive design of ironwork supporting the platform canopy. Photograph by P M Gates

Our illustrated front and back covers of a BR Western Region booklet produced in June 1963 exposes the sad end point to the high objective of integrated services, with a title including “Road – Rail” (the very reverse of the original criteria), when railways had been the original hub and not at the end of the spokes! Here we have Brecon, once the vital hub of this district’s rail services, having to offer the public a 24-page booklet detailing how they can use local buses of many independent companies, to access the nearest railway stations, namely Newport, Hereford, Newtown, Swansea, Carmarthen, Neath, Merthyr and Abergavenny.

Brecon station decorated for the visit of the Queen in August 1955

The above publication arose from the cessation of passenger services at Brecon from 31 December 1962 – before the publication of the Beeching report – and worse was inevitably to come with loss of goods and parcels services from 4 May 1964. Quite how long those ‘connecting’ bus services to stations lasted in actual fact is another question to ask.

The Queen arriving at Brecon station in August 1955

Today, Brecon is a vibrant hub of tourist traffic, all benefiting of course from the massive public investment in new or improved roads.

We cannot turn the clock back, but documents like the one we illustrate today, record for posterity quite how far and unexpected, once laudable high objectives, can come crashing down, when overwhelmed by changed circumstances and of course, Government policy.

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