Coats of Many Colours. Rail Liveries. The British Railways Steam Years from 1948. Key Publishing

[Robin Brasher]

Excellent bookazine with over 400 images showing standard green and black liveries and variations.  My favourite was BR maroon for the Tri-ang Princess and the Hornby Dublo City of London but Princess Arthur of Connaught looks dreadful here in a faded red colour.  My favourite is an Isle of Wight O2 at Freshwater which remained in malachite green with British Railways lettering until after May 18 1952 when the picture was taken. I was surprised how long the pre-nationalisation liveries lasted.

[Robin Brasher]

A picture on page 114 shows Duchess of Montrose in green livery ex works on March 15 1959 with the new totem,  Hornby Dublo's model had the cycling lion totem before Hornby Dublo replaced it with the maroon City of Liverpool. At the time the maroon livery made a refreshing change from green but now Duchess of Montrose looks splendid in lined green. The Hornby version illustrated here also has the old totem.

[Butler Henderson]

Its a bargain at £7.99. Only got to page 46 so far, couple of noticeable caption errors noted.

[Pint of Adnams]

Yes generally good but there are some captions that are transposed or misplaced and, disappointingly, only one image with a distant inclusion of any of the coaching stock experimental liveries - this one plum and split milk.

 

Also quite a few of the coloured liveries, even if only to show the lining, totem, etc., are printed in monochrome...

 

Nevertheless more than enough to justify the price.

[Robin Brasher]

Page 39 shows how the Southern Region continued to apply malachite green to its locomotives into 1949.  There is a black and white picture of T9 30119 at Waterloo on May 23 1950 and Hornby made a model of this engine.

[corneliuslundie]

If you want the full story of the transposition (very gradual!) from Southern Railway to Southern Region this is the book for you

(unashamed plug as I produced it for the HMRS, the author being John Harvey whose volume on the Southern Railway will be announced in the next couple of weeks.

Jonathan

 

Edited August 15, 2020 by corneliuslundie
Replace PDF with JPEG

[Robin Brasher]

I have read that book thank you and I found the colour chart useful.  I look forward to reading John Harvey's book on the Southern.  My main interest is the Southern Railway so I did not know about some of the other region's livery variations until I read Coat of Many colours.

[Robin Brasher]

There is an excellent picture on page 146 of T9 120 which ran in LSWR livery from March 1962 to July 1963. The Hornby model captures the livery very well. There were some changes to the engine since LSWR days so it would be more accurate to run the model with some BR green Mk1s than with some LSWR coaches.