BR Mk I (?) carriages in blue-grey livery

Feb 21, 2007 2 Replies
W

At our club's November flea-market, I bought a nice looking albeit obviously used, blue and grey buffet car, made by Hornby, running number



1805. (Cost $5.)

Can anyone provide some info on when this livery was used? Date of the model would also be welcome.



I removed the hollow rivets that held the bogies, plugged the holes with plastic rod (salvaged sprue form a building kit), drilled the plug, and remounted the bogies with #5 wood screws. I replaced the Hornby wheels with RP25 ones. Used the Exxact tool to clean out the bearings first, and applied graphite with 5B pencil. Starts rolling on a 1:200 incline now. Couplers still to come. The car will be used under the Christmas tree eventually.



TIA


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B

Blue-grey livery first appeared in 1964/5, IIRC, becoming virtually universal by 1970. I can't remember exactly when it disappeared, but by 1985 or so, it was no longer the most common livery. The Restaurant Minature Buffet, as modelled by Hornby, would have been used on trains where a full catering service wasn't justified (Newcastle-Liverpool, for example). The Hornby version first appeared in the mid-1960s, with a blue/grey version available by 1967. Brian

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T

"BH Williams" wrote

Only the experimental XP64 rake appeared in blue/grey in 1964 and its coaches were pretty much non-standard. It wasn't until 1965 that blue/grey was accepted by British Railways as their new standard livery, and I believe only a relatively few coaches appeared that year in the 'new' livery, with more widespread application from 1966 onwards.

Coach number 1805 (note the lack of a regional prefix) is likely to represent a coach in the early-mid 1980s after the regional prefixes were dropped.

Blue/grey was still in fairly widespread use a little later than you might imagine, especially on dmus - I've photographs of the latter in 1992.

John.

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