Repainting at grouping

[Mr chapman]

OK, the grouping has just happened on the railways and the big four have arrived. Was there a specific order in which rolling stock was repainted into the new owners livery? Looking mostly at the southern railway but curious about the rest as well. 

[tractionman]

for the Southern after the Grouping I recommend a look at this

 

https://www.abebooks.co.uk/9780851532783/Recollections-Southern-Wars-H.C-Casserley-0851532780/plp

 

lots of early-mid 1920s images, many showing locos still with their pre-Grouping insignia and numbers, but passenger stock in new Southern livery.

 

all the best,

 

Keith

 

 

 

 

 

 

[jim.snowdon]

29 minutes ago, Mr chapman said:

OK, the grouping has just happened on the railways and the big four have arrived. Was there a specific order in which rolling stock was repainted into the new owners livery? Looking mostly at the southern railway but curious about the rest as well. 

Essentially, no. Repainting rolling stock, including locomotives, for the sake of it cost money and would not be justified. These are, after all, commercial companies trying to make a profit for their shareholders. The most economic time to undertake reprints was when the vehicle concerned went through their normal overhaul cycle, which would be measured in years.

 

Jim

[The Johnster]

Agreed; nowadays insistence on brand awareness ensures that ‘Marketing’ insists that new liveries are applies very quickly and budgets are made for this, but back then, and at nationalisation, locos and stock were repainted when they were due for a repaint, at major overhaul time.  The intervening livery changes were done on the same basis; I doubt very much if any of the big four even had even all of it’s locos in the current livery, never mind the rest of the stock, and BR certainly never achieved it. 

[Steamport Southport]

It was pretty quick, especially on the Southern. Don't forget the LSWR, LBSC and SECR didn't really have a lot of stock and quite a lot of it was being replaced or rebuilt at the time. Maunsell built or rebuilt hundreds of carriages for example.

 

When were things repainted? When they had a works visit normally. If you look at photos there is very little pre grouping liveried stock after about 1927. It was before the depression so labour was cheap and plentiful. But probably not cheerful.

 

It's also worth considering that the locomotive department and Carriage & Wagon departments were totally separate. You weren't waiting for the locomotives to be repainted before they started on the wagons. Or even the passenger locomotives to be repainted before the shunters. It was what was next in the queue or needed. Obviously your "top link" locomotives and carriages will be overhauled more often and kept in better condition and they would try to keep them in the latest livery.

 

If you haven't already, have a good browse of this website for information on the Southern.

 

http://www.semgonline.com/home.html

 

 

 

Jason

[Kelly]

The Southern also revarnished rather than repainted in a lot of cases.

[jim.snowdon]

5 hours ago, Steamport Southport said:

When were things repainted? When they had a works visit normally. If you look at photos there is very little pre grouping liveried stock after about 1927. It was before the depression so labour was cheap and plentiful. But probably not cheerful.

That would be consistent with a nominally five year overhaul cycle.

 

Apart from that, labour costs generally rose significantly after the end of the First World War, so whilst labour might still have been reasonably plentiful, not forgetting the considerable numbers that had been lost as a result of the war, it wasn't as cheap as it had been.

 

Jim

[eastglosmog]

From looking at a few picture books, HC Casserly notes that by 1927/8, nearly all Highland locos were in LMS livery, only one or two small tank engines left in Highland livery.

Maurice Early has a number of pictures of Southern locos  still in LSWR livery in 1924.  Come 1926, all the ones in the book at least are in Southern livery, including one LSWR 4-4-0 that was scrapped in 1928, from which you might conclude there was a concerted effort to repaint Southern locos.

[jim.snowdon]

3 hours ago, Kelly said:

The Southern also revarnished rather than repainted in a lot of cases.

A practice common amongst other railways as well.

 

Jim

[jim.snowdon]

15 minutes ago, eastglosmog said:

From looking at a few picture books, HC Casserly notes that by 1927/8, nearly all Highland locos were in LMS livery, only one or two small tank engines left in Highland livery.

Maurice Early has a number of pictures of Southern locos  still in LSWR livery in 1924.  Come 1926, all the ones in the book at least are in Southern livery, including one LSWR 4-4-0 that was scrapped in 1928, from which you might conclude there was a concerted effort to repaint Southern locos.

Yes, but by 1926, it is well into the normal overhaul cycle, and the Southern was not a company with lots of money to spare, never mind that it was by then spending quite heavily on electrification.

 

As for the 4-4-0 scrapped in 1928, it could easily have been one of the first to go through works in 1923. That's five years earlier, and before any decision to withdraw it.

 

Jim 

[Wickham Green]

13 hours ago, Mr chapman said:

OK, the grouping has just happened on the railways and the big four have arrived. Was there a specific order in which rolling stock was repainted into the new owners livery? Looking mostly at the southern railway but curious about the rest as well. 

As has been stated above repainting would - normally - have followed the standard cycle for whichever type of vehicle was concerned ( and this may have varied between the different workshops for a few year into grouping ) but the other element of livery is lettering and numbering and these were often updated far quicker than the basic colour : the latest HMRS Livery Register (https://hmrs.org.uk/southern-style-after-nationalisation-1948-1964.html) gives an idea of how this panned out at Nationalisation - and there can be little doubt that it was a similar mess at grouping !

[Dunsignalling]

I've seen a reference to some LSWR T9s retaining their pre-1923 colours and markings post-1925, even after receiving superheated boilers.

 

That has a couple of implications, [1] that reboilering happened (at least in some cases) independently of scheduled overhauls and [2] that, if the existing finish was in good nick, the new boiler would be painted to match, with a full repaint deferred to the next overhaul.

 

Loyalty to the old firm, using up paint stocks, or just a need to get locos modified and back in to traffic as quickly as possible?

 

John  

Edited July 19, 2019 by Dunsignalling

[eastglosmog]

4 hours ago, jim.snowdon said:

Yes, but by 1926, it is well into the normal overhaul cycle, and the Southern was not a company with lots of money to spare, never mind that it was by then spending quite heavily on electrification.

 

As for the 4-4-0 scrapped in 1928, it could easily have been one of the first to go through works in 1923. That's five years earlier, and before any decision to withdraw it.

 

Jim 

As a matter of fact, the loco concerned (0468) was repainted in Jan 1926 and scrapped in May 1928, so can hardly have been as a consequence of being first to go through works.  As another example, how about 0451? Repainted in March 1924 and withdrawn in December 1924 (paint and withdrawal dates from Bradley).

[Nick C]

I think the general principle, at least on the Southern, was that locos were repainted roughly every 5 years, coaches every 10. However they may well have prioritised stuff that they knew was going to be kept, and not bothered too much with stock that was soon to be withdrawn - certainly a lot of the non-standard pre-grouping Isle of Wight stock never got SR livery or numbers.

 

Certainly with nationalisation, it's a well known fact that quite a lot of ex-SR coaches were never painted in blood & custard, going straight from much-revarnished Malachite to post-56 green.

[jim.snowdon]

43 minutes ago, eastglosmog said:

As a matter of fact, the loco concerned (0468) was repainted in Jan 1926 and scrapped in May 1928, so can hardly have been as a consequence of being first to go through works.  As another example, how about 0451? Repainted in March 1924 and withdrawn in December 1924 (paint and withdrawal dates from Bradley).

Thank you for that detail. It reminds me of the old railway adage - when the painters arrive it's a sign of impending closure. The case of 0451 is symptomatic of a disconnect between the Locomotive and Operating departments, not for the first time. Until into the 1930s it was not unknown for some locomotive departments to require locomotives to be sent to works for overhaul simply to keep the workshops occupied, rather than being overhauled on the basis of condition.

 

Jim 

[Wickham Green]

1 hour ago, Dunsignalling said:

......... using up paint stocks, .............

Maybe using up paint INGREDIENTS ? ...... most paint was mixed on site in them, there far off days !

[Compound2632]

On the LMS, at least as far as locomotives were concerned, things seem to have varied considerably from works to works. Of course at Derby all that had to happen was to replace the cabside coat of arms with the LMS roundel (for passenger engines) or red panel (for goods engines). Crewe, on the other hand, was notoriously slow at getting round to painting passenger engines red - this could simply have been because engines were not coming through the works for a full overhaul at a very great rate, compared to the total number of ex-LNWR engines (over 3,000). The Scottish works seem to have been much quicker at adopting red. One has to factor in the fairly brief period, 1923-1928, in which red was the official livery for all passenger engines.

 

Carriages on the principal west coast services seem to have been repainted in Midland livery rather quickly - both because such vehicles were anyway very well looked-after and also because they were the rolling stock most in the public eye. Carriages generally seem to be red within 4-5 years, except for some NPCS.

 

Wagons... as and when. The remains of pre-Grouping liveries could be seen well into the 30s.

 

That's based on an impression of the photographic evidence; one has to be careful: many apparently pre-Grouping photos may actually be from the mid-20s. Much as O.S. Nock's accounts of the pre-Grouping companies (The Golden Age of Steam etc.) are actually based on his travels and footplate experience in the late 20s / early 30s - he was born in 1905. The Grouping companies never really achieved a distinct identity - the underlying pre-Grouping identity was usually very strong - until the later 30s at the earliest; I'm thinking of re-signalling with tubular posts on the LMS, for instance.

 

 

 

 

[LMS2968]

One reason for Crewe's lack of enthusiasm to paint ex-LNWR engines red - apart from absolute distaste at the idea of a Midland livery  - was that Crewe Works was undergoing a major modernisation and such complications as mixing Crimson Lake would seem to have been beyond them at the time. Absolutely true!

 

The main problem though on what had become LMS Western Division A was tenders. The engines were renumbered even if not repainted into the LMS system, but hit a snag. Crewe had built fewer tenders than locos on the basis that they took less time to repair than the engines, so an engine emerging from a works overhaul would invariably be coupled to a different tender. This was totally different to the system where engines and tenders were married, as it were, for life and the engine number was on the tender. The LNWR number was on brass cabside plates, which had been removed, and Crewe didn't always fit the equally detested Midland-style smokebox number plate, so there are many examples of engines with a different number on the smokebox and tender, and others where only the wrong tender number was displayed - not only wrong engine but often wrong class.

[brack]

Were the grouped railways caught up on maintenance from WW1 by 1923?

If they'd been deferring work during the war (and once they knew grouping was imminent) which seems plausible, there would be a backlog of locos and stock to put through works which they'd need to catch up on post 1923. Catching up on that would cause a rapid increase in repaints in the first few years post grouping compared to the usual cycle.

[The Johnster]

My impression, and no more than that, is that the Great War affected production and maintenance of stock on the home front (I don't think the term was even coined then) to a much lesser extent that in WW2.  The German U boat blockade was less effective, the nation less dependent on imports especially oil, there were no food shortages or rationing, and the military threat was much less; no blitz and no shelling of shipping in the English Channel.  There were Zeppelin raids and naval bombardments of East Coast towns, which were terrifying and intended as such, to affect civilian morale, but had little impact on the way industry in general and railways in particular operated.  New locos were built and new designs introduced.  The railways did war work of course, and Ashford produced no locos while Woolwich Arsenal built them.  Maintenance was by and large kept up as in peace time; there was no blackout and no overall speed limit as in WW2.  

 

'Austerity' type liveries were used especially for freight locos, which suggests a paint shortage perhaps because of the duress the chemical industry was under with explosives contracts, but this may have been because it was felt inappropriate to display complex colourful liveries at a time when wholesale slaughter was taking place on the Western Front and every street in the land had houses with drawn curtains for mourning.  Staffing was different as well; conscription was not needed at all until 1916 and many railwaymen who had been refused the chance to volunteer were now given reserved occupation status, including skilled workshop and maintenance staff.  

 

So there wasn't much catching up to do between 1918 and 1923, certainly not as compared to 1945 and 1950!  The accelerated timetable for the new 'Elizabethan', which matched the restored 'Flying Scotsman' schedule, was not possible until the lifting of the 70mph wartime speed limit in 1953, so you can say 8 years to catch up after WW2, probably around 18 months after WW1.   

Edited July 19, 2019 by The Johnster

[Compound2632]

Many railway works were given over to munitions manufacture; that and shortage of labour - many railwaymen joining up in the first great rush of enthusiasm - did result in arrears of maintenance but these were addressed pretty quickly as soon as war work finished. I suspect simplified liveries were down to shortage of labour and above all time - the need to get engines back into traffic quickly - rather than shortage of paint!

Edited July 19, 2019 by Compound2632

[LMS2968]

8 minutes ago, The Johnster said:

My impression, and no more than that,  . . . .  The German U boat blockade was less effective, the nation less dependent on imports especially oil, there were no food shortages or rationing, and the military threat was much less; no blitz and no shelling of shipping in the English Channel.   

Don't underestimate the U Boat campaign in World War I. It was very effective once Germany went to unrestricted U boat warfare. This finished in 1915 following the Lusitania sinking and America's threat to enter the war unless the campaign was stopped. It was, but by 1917 the war from the German point of view was going badly and it was resurrected. America did enter the war but mobilisation took time, and in that time Britain was down to six weeks' worth of vital supplies as a result of the sinkings. The First Sea Lord, by that time John Jellicoe, hadn't a clue how to tackle it. Eventually, a combination of convoying, which Jellicoe said was impractical, and the development of ASDIC, now called sonar, provided the solutions.

[The Johnster]

Oh, I'm not underestimating WW1 U boats, merely saying that they were less effective in enforcing a naval blockade of the UK than they were in WW2.  The U boats themselves were smaller, and so were the ships, which meant that the total number sunk had less impact on the tonnage lost.  The Kriegsmarin's uterseeboots came very close to winning Germany the war in 1942 in the Atlantic and the Mediterranean, and while they made terrible inroads in WW1, were not a threat of that sort of decisive level.  There were no food or serious material shortages during WW1 here, but our naval blockade of Germany was a major factor in that nation's defeat.

[eastglosmog]

22 minutes ago, LMS2968 said:

Don't underestimate the U Boat campaign in World War I. It was very effective once Germany went to unrestricted U boat warfare. This finished in 1915 following the Lusitania sinking and America's threat to enter the war unless the campaign was stopped. It was, but by 1917 the war from the German point of view was going badly and it was resurrected. America did enter the war but mobilisation took time, and in that time Britain was down to six weeks' worth of vital supplies as a result of the sinkings. The First Sea Lord, by that time John Jellicoe, hadn't a clue how to tackle it. Eventually, a combination of convoying, which Jellicoe said was impractical, and the development of ASDIC, now called sonar, provided the solutions.

I think it was all down to using convoy (which the navy should have done from day 1 if they had studied naval history). Asdic was a very late development in WW1, there were only 7 ships fitted with it by November 1918.

[eastglosmog]

Going back to what this thread is about, I have skimmed through Bradley's LSWR loco books and the earliest date for repainting of an LSWR loco in Southern green I have found is December 1923.  Before that in 1923, they were painted Urie LSWR green.  Last date I have found for repainting to Southern green is March 1927.  However, I have not looked at every class, so may be some outliers.  There was at least one loco that ran for several years in Urie green with a  Southern painted tender.