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Donkey Jackets


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A strange question I know, but does anyone know when orange shoulder panels appeared on donkey jackets? (those tough short black coats favoured by those working outdoors). A search on google was unsuprisingly unhelpfull.

 

I'm painting some Dapol railway workers at the moment you see...

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The Health and Safety at Work Act 1974 encouraged many manufacturers to design lots of things we didn't know we couldn't do without.

 

On the roads I'd say late '70's. On rail not until the early '80's cos we had the mini-vests to go over the top. Probably sectorization / privatization produced wholesale changes like this.

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  • RMweb Gold

At Birmingham New Street in 1966 there was an experiment with white donkey jackets, I think with reflective shoulders, for signalling fault teams when going into the tunnels under traffic and elsewhere in darkness. They lasted about 3 weeks before they were dirty grey. Sometime in the late 1960s they were replaced with donkey jackets with orange shoulders.

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Guest Natalie Graham

I think they came in around the mid-seventies. Certainly the miners' ones where I lived were plain black with NCB on the back but I can remember seeing the orange patched version around then, even though plain black was the norm.

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