British Rail was the brand image of the nationalised railway owner and operator in Great Britain, the British Railways Board, used from 1965 until its breakup and sell-off from 1993 onwards.
From an initial standardised corporate image, several sub-brands emerged for marketing purposes and later in preparation for privatisation. These brands covered rail networks, customers services and several classes of new trains.
With the size of British Rail's fleet, due to the time required to repaint rolling stock, brand switchovers could be lengthy affairs, often lasting years. This worsened into privatisation, with the same services using trains using three or four different liveries.
Following privatisation, most of the brand names disappeared, although some such as ScotRail, Merseyrail, Eurostar and Freightliner still exist today.
The double-arrow symbol, which was the symbol of British Rail from 1965, still remains after privatisation as a unifying branding device used by the privatised National Rail network. It is shown on most tickets, stations, timetables, publicity and road signs indicating stations, but not trains. It is, however, set to be used more generally once again by Great British Railways.
Timeline of brands
Under the Transport Act 1962, responsibility for the state railway operation, British Railways, was transferred from being a trade name and subsidiary of the British Transport Commission, to a separate public corporation, under the British Railways Board.
As the last steam locomotives were being withdrawn by 1968, under the 1955 Modernisation Plan, the corporation's public name was rebranded in 1965 as British Rail, which introduced the double-arrow symbol, a standard typeface named Rail Alphabet and the BR blue livery, which was applied to nearly all locomotives and rolling stock.
The first major BR sub-brand to appear was InterCity. This was augmented with the InterCity 125 brand in 1976, in conjunction with the introduction of the InterCity 125 High Speed Train.
In the 1980s under sectorisation, blue livery was phased out as the organisation converted from a regional structure to being sector-based. The InterCity brand was relaunched and passenger brands Network SouthEast
List of brands
Networks
- Island Line - passenger services on the Isle of Wight (Ryde - Shanklin) from 1989. Part of Network SouthEast
- Merseyrail - a passenger service brand for Merseyside
- Network NorthWest - passenger service brand paralleling Network SouthEast for Greater Manchester and Lancashire, introduced in 1989[1] as part of Regional Railways. After a few years, it was replaced by the Regional Railways branding
- Network SouthEast (originally London & South Eastern) - commuter and medium-distance trains operating in an area bounded roughly by King's Lynn, Peterborough
References
- Summary of Events: 1986 to 2002 - Greater Manchester's Museum of Transport retrieved 2014-06-30^
- Brian Hardy. Tube Trains on the Isle of Wight Capital Transport, 2003^