Favourite steam livery

In message , Andy Sollis CVMRD writes

filthy black

Great Western green, LMS maroon; and plain black with and without striping, as eg L&Y.

Black w/ silver smoke box, brown cab roof, red cab window frames; gold, silver, or white lettering (as many US roads).

Black with dark green boiler and cab side, gold lettering (as in CNR, GTW).

I thought the Coronation blue and silver liveries were um, er, too

1930-ish. Dated very quickly.

I don't like red wheels, ands usually white driver rims don't work. Main exception: Lima's "super-power" locomotives, IMO the handsomest steam engines built in the 20th century.

But drive rods etc should be polished.

-- Wolf

"Don't believe everything you think." (Maxine)

This is more of a challenge (than the diesel posting above)...

It's a tie between Stroudley's Improved Engine Green and British Railways Lined Black (late crest, off course ;-)

Ian J.

Dean's Great Western livery. A darker green with Indian red frames, fully lined out with lots of polished brass, steel and copper.

Also Wolverhampton green (a bluish sea green with white lining), like my O-gauge 517 which was backdated to Wolverhampton condition.

LMS pacific in LMS or BR Maroon followed by BR Green, LMS black and BR Blue. But LMS maroon isnt the best for all, for instance a Fowler tank looks much better in LMS lined black than maroon.

Cheers, simon

"Andy Sollis CVMRD" wrote

Unequivocably - BR mixed traffic black.

John.

With red-backed name and number plates.

Surely that'd be NSR red?

Favourite is difficult, given that some many of the earlier schemes are only tentively known. We can probably rule the early L&M scheme out though

- dark green everywhere, including buffer beams..

Personal favourites - and you must accept that these are based on secondary sources such as Hamilton-Ellis' paintings - might include: Furness Railway, during the period when the coaches had white upper panels (iron-ore red engines, royal blue and white coaches); Cambrian Railways (again, during the white-upper-panel era) with black locomotives and mid-green and white coaches and - my personal favourite - Mid-Wales Railway, with bronze-green engines and terra-cotta and cream coaches. Most entertaining, though, would be Fletcher-era NER (when there were at least four official locomotive liveries for different sections, as many for coaches, different colours of coaches for different classes and much encouragement for drivers to adorn their locomotives as they chose - probably much the same effects as India in the 1970s..).

I can't remember ever seeing a real-life loco in anything other than black.

In model form I like LMR Coronation maroon the most.

(kim)

"Andrew Robert Breen" wrote

Surely that'd be NSR red? Andy Breen

Andy, Your quite correct, I think I had a CRAFT moment before rushing off to work (Can't Remember A Flippin' Thing)

Under LMS the locos were black, although J.B. Earle ran in maroon with a LMS coach crest on the bunker side for a short while.

So I guess we are both right. Never keen on the brown livery they had, although I have never found any hard evidence other than say so that it existed as everything is B&W/

- Leek & Manifold website

Yes I think the L&M certainly deserves credit for the primrose coaches.

I'm afraid the livery that really presses my buttons is entirely mainstream and predicatable - an ex-GWR loco in Western Region lined green - there are certainly other factors other than purely aesthetic ones: it is associated with the place I was brought up, the places where we went on holiday and an era during which I was alive (although not really old enough to appreciate it). But I'm convinced that dark green is the colour that best complements copper and brass; I'm inclined to favour the BR version over the original GWR version because (a) lining was much more widely applied (b) the BR late crest is an excellent piece of design and more impressive than mere text, no matter how much gilding, shading and counter-shading it employs (c) cabside lining on side-window cabs was applied in a simple rectangle rather than awkwardly up around the window (d) a 20th-Century loco never looks quite right to me without a smokebox number plate - they look disconcertingly "blind" without one.

Was BR lining the same as GWR lining? I'm sure I've seen suggestions that it was yellow or yellowish rather than orange.

I'm aware, though, that my choice is historically uninformed - like those public polls of the "best films ever made" which include hardly anything earlier than Star Wars.

The other livery that must have looked rather impressive was the very early LMS crimson that seems to have been applied rather indiscriminately to a whole bunch of old crocks from the constituent companies, imparting an unaccustomed splendour to their twilight years. The initials LMS appeared on the cabside in small, widely- spaced letters, lending an air of discreet, understated class. I don't think there are many surviving locos that could authentically carry that livery, but I'd love to see Hardwicke done up like that.

Andy

"Andy Sollis CVMRD" wrote

For locos, Great Eastern blue, with the vermilion coupling rods: see GER

490 in the NRM, and if only a Claud Hamilton had survived! I'd like to have seen M&GN yellow ochre from around the same time, especially chuffing along past fields of Norfolk mustard in flower. No-one seems to have found an excuse to turn out a preserved loco in this livery, possibly because there's nothing of "proper" (ie Melton Constable-built to Marriott designs) M&GN origin surviving that I know of.

For coaching stock, panelled LNWR duck-egg-and-blackberry must have been quite a sight on a sunny mainline day. Quainton Road have something done in it, but I saw it half finished and in the carriage shed under artificial light which didn't give the whole effect.

Tony Clarke (actually modelling in 1960 WR grunge)

whole bunch of old crocks - and some magnificent engines.

Or the LMS coat of arms instead of letters.

Cheers, Simon

like prewar Germany livery black with motion in red ?

LNWR black or LMS Maroon

as an aside - how about building a layout purely in grayscales - after all i have no memories of steam in colour-somehow it would look more real if it was in grey - cos (nearly) all the pics are in grey...

guy

Andy, are you here as well?

honestly could you please tell me all the groups you visit so that I can get the pic of the bunch the easy way;-) ?

guy

Scales of grey, what a wonderful idea. I'm red/green colour blind and all these colour schemes are very baffling.

In my memory, everything to do with railways was a dirty grey anyway.

Actually a Military Modeller did do this with a diorama (can't find the pic offhand) and it looked very effective, especially next to the real photo of the scene, in the flesh it took a while to actually realise it was Grey scales.