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When did BR start using metric on signs?


DavidBird
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The cover shot of the June 2021 Model Rail magazine is of Mark wilson's Penmouth and Curzon Street "00" layout.  A wider cut of the same photo is shown on pages 24/25.

It shows a station scene with two grubby "Westerns", one blue and one in maroon, both with 4-character headcode panels in use.  This seems to date it to around 1972 at the latest - I'm unsure when the westerns all went into blue.

There is a archway in the station wall, with a warning sign "Maximum Height 2.6m".

 

Is the sign in metres appropriate for around 1972?

When did BR start using metric on public signs like this?

 

Absolutely no criticism of the layout implied - it is an inspiration!

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Interesting question, and not one I'd thought about. Technically, it is a road sign so should have obeyed the Traffic Signs Regulations and General Directions in effect when the sign was last changed.

 

If you google for 'traffic signs regulations and general directions 1975' there is a PDF. The 1975 version replaced the 1964 regulations. I'm not going to read every page, but the 1975 sign for clearance under a bridge shows feet and inches. The 1981 regulations replace the 1975 version and say that Metric Units may be substituted for imperial units within the warning triangle.

 

The 1975 version does not say the metric units may be substituted.

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21 hours ago, DavidBird said:

There is a archway in the station wall, with a warning sign "Maximum Height 2.6m".

 

Is the sign in metres appropriate for around 1972?

 

Depending upon exactly what the arch is, it may or not be a "road bridge" as in the sense of a bridge over a public road, so the Traffic Signs Regulations may, or may not, be applicable.

 

If it is a "private" sign, I would make two observations:

 

- private signage tends to "follow the lead" of what people see on the highway (often resulting in badly-designed and confusing 'cod copies', not naming any motorway service areas in particular!), but old private signs often linger for years without being changed, and there are probably pure "feet and inches" ones still in situ now; and,

 

- apart for children, who were being brought-up at school with both systems in parallel, and specialist engineers, my gut feeling is that the vast majority of people in Britain in 1972 thought in feet and inches, so anybody putting up a metric-only height restriction sign was asking for trouble, because the lorry would hit it before the driver had finished trying to recall how big a metre is ("Just over a yard, mate.").

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30 minutes ago, Nearholmer said:

 

Depending upon exactly what the arch is, it may or not be a "road bridge" as in the sense of a bridge over a public road, so the Traffic Signs Regulations may, or may not, be applicable.

 

If it is a "private" sign, I would make two observations:

 

- private signage tends to "follow the lead" of what people see on the highway (often resulting in badly-designed and confusing 'cod copies', not naming any motorway service areas in particular!), but old private signs often linger for years without being changed, and there are probably pure "feet and inches" ones still in situ now; and,

 

- apart for children, who were being brought-up at school with both systems in parallel, and specialist engineers, my gut feeling is that the vast majority of people in Britain in 1972 thought in feet and inches, so anybody putting up a metric-only height restriction sign was asking for trouble, because the lorry would hit it before the driver had finished trying to recall how big a metre is ("Just over a yard, mate.").

 

Yes. When I did CSEs and 'O' levels, in 1967 - 1969, they were entirely in imperial units with a bit of CGS thrown in. When I resat/converted my CSEs to GCE in 1969/70, everything was in SI, even at that date, and that followed on in college the following year.

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I don't remember what units we learned (if any) in early primary school, but in later years (about 1973 to 1976) the maths was entirely in metric.  There was a section with imperial units in the back of the textbook but we never looked at it.  But despite working in metric in my engineering job, I still think in feet and inches for everyday height and weight.  

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The Imperial-Metric crossover in schools must have spread through the late 1960s, and I have a hunch that Decimalsation of the currency in 1971 marked a sort of watershed, with Imperial everything being "normal", but Metric taught as a secondary thing before that, and the reverse position afterwards.

 

Certainly, when I started at infants' school (1963, I think) everything was Imperial, and we very quickly had to grapple with all the different 'bases' that throws at you (not that we knew they were 'bases' at that stage). By secondary school, everything was metric, thankfully, while at junior school we got a rich brew of both.

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16 minutes ago, Nearholmer said:

The Imperial-Metric crossover in schools must have spread through the late 1960s, and I have a hunch that Decimalsation of the currency in 1971 marked a sort of watershed, with Imperial everything being "normal", but Metric taught as a secondary thing before that, and the reverse position afterwards.

 

Certainly, when I started at infants' school (1963, I think) everything was Imperial, and we very quickly had to grapple with all the different 'bases' that throws at you (not that we knew they were 'bases' at that stage). By secondary school, everything was metric, thankfully, while at junior school we got a rich brew of both.

One of the questions in my 11+ in 1962 was metric(ish), where there was one of those "how much does X cost if X+Y+Z costs 3*Z-Y", when all the costs were in US dollars & cents !

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It's amazing, the SI units came in around 1970 and still so many people think imperial, with metric being gobbledygook.

 

When will the period of waiting for all the oldies to die off eventuate?

 

Did the French have the same issue, when they first came up with Metric, taking decades (how ironic!) to become standard locally?

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20 minutes ago, Nearholmer said:

 

For the avoidance of confusion to younger readers: inches were not a unit of weight. 

 

16 minutes ago, Jeremy C said:

No. They were, of course, a unit of brake pressure. :)

Inches of mercury, of course.............

 

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Just now, kevinlms said:

 

When will the period of waiting for all the oldies to die off eventuate?

 

I'm 75 and do most things in metric and have done for 50 years or so, thanks to my employer being metric friendly, we were going metric in the '60s

I know plenty of much younger people that don't know metric and still talk in pounds and feet for everything

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2 hours ago, 62613 said:

 

Yes. When I did CSEs and 'O' levels, in 1967 - 1969, they were entirely in imperial units with a bit of CGS thrown in. When I resat/converted my CSEs to GCE in 1969/70, everything was in SI, even at that date, and that followed on in college the following year.

I was in the second intake at a new school in Congleton (Blackfirs, presumably circa 1971) and we were only taught metric. Since then it's been metric all the way although some of that was down to my education and career choices (physics then computer programming). But I don't think the imperial measurement system was ever 'taught' to me. That's a pity because even as a young whippersnapper I'd have appreciated the numerous opportunities for sarcasm :)

 

I use imperial for driving and golf but at age 54 I'm metric through choice and struggle to make sense of imperial. I have a few rough and ready conversions (like 2lb = 1kg and 1 yard = 1 metre) and don't care enough to make the effort to improve. If someone can't/won't give me a metric value then I assume it's unimportant :D

 

In any case I like to wind the imperial brigade up by claiming that there's actually no such system. Since their units have been defined by metric values for many years now (the official definition of an inch is 25.4mm) it's clear that they don't have a system at all. They just have a bizarre collection of alternative words for abitrary metric measurements. :devil:

Edited by AndrueC
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19 minutes ago, kevinlms said:

 

Did the French have the same issue, when they first came up with Metric, taking decades (how ironic!) to become standard locally?

There are still some french artisans (such as woodworkers) that use inches!:yes: (pouces?)

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19 minutes ago, kevinlms said:

Did the French have the same issue, when they first came up with Metric, taking decades (how ironic!) to become standard locally?

Also sad that the British government first proposed going metric in the late 19th century. And although people like to claim that the metric system is French it was actually a joint effort and Britain did a lot of the work through it's scientific community. Even America was involved and thought it was a good idea.

 

But there are now only two countries that aren't officially metric. The USA and Burma. And the USA is trying to go metric.

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I had to convert our software to handle inches.

 

Uses a 254mm system, so for all the inchy things between 1/16 and 10 inches have a mapped proper measurement.

 

Conversion is carried out on the screen edit classes.

 

Our licencing routine though means they only have 12 valid licence dates per year.

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1 hour ago, melmerby said:

I'm 75 and do most things in metric and have done for 50 years or so, thanks to my employer being metric friendly, we were going metric in the '60s

I know plenty of much younger people that don't know metric and still talk in pounds and feet for everything

Sad that so much effort was expended to educate on the metric system, then for it to be effectively ignored. It was largely retailers that brought the conversion program down.

 

In Australia for a while Imperial stuff like rulers was going to be banned, but hardware chains pushed for the right to be able to sell rulers etc, marked in both systems. Which of course undermined the change.

 

Now we have progressed. I purchased some 3/16 bolts that were 50mm long, according to the packet!

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yep 1960s primary school foots and inches 1970s secondary school Metric..

 

USA is technically metric. Having signed the metric treaty long before the UK. Their foot is dimensioned officially as 304mm as all their units are derived from Metric measurements..

 

Its just their public doesn't know that.. I expect a few orange supporter heads would explode it they were told..

Edited by TheQ
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56 minutes ago, TheQ said:

Its just their public doesn't know that.. I expect a few orange supporter heads would explode it they were told..

There's also the more ignorant Brexit supporters who thought that leaving the EU would mean the UK going back to imperial.

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1 hour ago, kevinlms said:

Sad that so much effort was expended to educate on the metric system, then for it to be effectively ignored. It was largely retailers that brought the conversion program down.

A case in point, which I have mentioned before, was the "Metric Martyr" greengrocer, so named by the anti-EU popuplist press who wanted nothing to do with metric as it was nasty European (e.g. EU) stuff being foisted upon a British public against their will and not the superior British measures.

He went to court to fight for the right to sell greengrocery in imperial "because our older customers don't understand metric" and duly won.

This led to a greengrocer I used moving back to Imperial (to my annoyance) and promptly fleecing the oldies by selling e.g. apples at £1 per lb, when they were £1.50/kg in the metric shops.

The "oldies" thought they were doing well because his apples were only £1 when they are £1.50 at the supermarket!

I never shopped there again, he eventually went out of business, when I assume people realised how high the prices actually were and went elsewhere.

 

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4 minutes ago, Nearholmer said:

Just driven under a 15’ 0” sign on NR-owned bridge over a public highway, no metric equivalent shown, so these things obviously linger for ages.

 

They certainly do, I'm going to make a point of looking at the Wern underbridge on the Cambrian next time I go to work, it frequently relegates Spar lorries to shards of canvas and groceries so will be interesting to see what's on the sign. Last time I took note it was Imperial, though the last time I took note was a long time ago even though I drive under it at least weekly! 

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