looks like its now official its no longer a fictional livery in game whats your thoughts ? I wonder if DTG knew this before releasing he GBR pack ???? probably not but heck that was convenient still
You could paint an 802 in improved engine green, just because the loco and the livery exists doesn't mean it isn't fantasy.
I think it looks a bit busy on the eye. I was hoping it would be return to BR era blue or geen, a bit like what GWR did with their greens livery which looked classic. Or at least a simple scheme like DB or ÖBB.
I didn't like it on the 802, but its slowly growing on me on the 387. The front and rear carriage seems good but im not sure about the intermediate carriages. It is still relatively simplistic but obvious if that makes any sense. It is intentionally cheap because it is. No point wasting money throwing paint on trains. Interestingly the 387 still has "southern" however this isn't about the operator but more of a regional identifier. So we wont see "Avanti West Coast" but maybe just "West Coast" or "West Mainline". I think once more trains start getting the livery we'll start getting used to it. New stations that get built will also be GBR branded as existing stations get the same link of paint.
thank god I'm in Scotland and don't have to look at that abomination the should have used LNERs take on the swallow livery
I like it! Definitely seems to be a polarising livery but I really like it. I do hope we get regionalised branding, though. We should definitely have different colours on trains depending on where they operate (but the regions don't necessarily have to be exactly the same as they are right now).
Well i suppose there is one upside to the new livery, once the taggers get in there they can't make it look any worse
I think it is a livery that will eventually grow on people, although it is sad to start losing all the different rail company liveries. BR would have been a more solid choice, adding "Great" at this time when things are NOT so great just seems more like government propaganda. However, I don't think anybody would have been mad if they went back to BR blue.
I don't hate it on the trains they've done but they should adapt it for intercity type trains. Why? That'll just reduce flexibility and portray a fractured, rather than unified, system, and potentially introduce confusion for passengers (is my ticket valid on this?).
this is where technology again has let us down, we need cheap mixed reality glasses, then we can have any livery we want
it actually looks really good on the 701. I like the regional touch with - South Western. Hope they do that for all of them
I`m most apprehensive about the standardisation of everything. All trains wearing the same paintjob. The North of England will at least benefit more from this.
aye at least with the old liveries u could at a glance check if the train was regional or intercity, or if you were down London way be reminded to buy toothpaste
It’s definitely growing on me.. I think I already posted that the 701 and 387 look pretty good tbh I am disappointed that everything will look the same
I love how right now here it only takes a glance to know which stations a given 80x stops at, and therefore which train at which platform is mine, based on the livery on each of the platforms, going to be a nightmare once they're all the same colour.
I don't mean something like we have now, but something like a different coloured stripe would do (as long as it's more prominent than the OHLE orange warning line that we currently have). Something to easily distinguish between different regions at a glance instead of having to read the side of the train.
This seems to be quite a popular take. Could someone explain the issue with this particular "flag waving"? It's a 'Great British Railways' livery, within Great Britain. Maybe there's something I'm missing here?
It may not be fictional. But it's not accurate either as regions will have their name branded on the livery.
Just as we know that the ‘Unite the Kingdom’ movement is designed to do the opposite - to exclude and marginalise a particular segment of our society - flag-waving is normally designed to separate ‘us’ from ‘them’ and create division. A confident nation does not need to plaster its flag over everything and anything. For me, railways brings people together - literally and metaphorically - and we should do everything we can to keep them free of flag-waving and the politics of division.
Our flag will not be dragged into the mud. Just as there are people using our flag as you have opined, there are people bashing our flag and our country. The Govt did not paint our flag on trains to be ashamed of it, nor to divide. I will not be ashamed of my country, regardless of whether I feel the livery is a bit much, or whether I would have painted the trains differently. I love my country.
I suppose people are referring to flag waving for political statements. In general, the left wing is often using all kind of different flags, while the right wing likes to use the national flag. But a flag is national symbol of a country, so it's not that weird to use it on a train, however for me personally it's to much.
Yeah, basically. The flag can be political, but it is also basically the logo of a country. We can`t do anything about how they`ve decided to paint the trains, though.
Where are you from? I’d assume it’s the same in every country right now, and not just the UK. Lefties see a patriot as a racist, patriots wave their flag because of a broken system/government. I’m proud of my country and its accomplishments. I’d happily wear a Union Jack t-shirt and Christian cross. I have nothing to be ashamed of.
Great Britain is the largest island in the British Isles so the great should really only be taken to imply size. Of course, like any word it can be misused. I don't mind the livery, and I think it should be ok to use the flag for a national public service that will (I very much hope) be a positive thing. Otherwise we are giving it up to those who want it to symbolise intolerance and division.
Personally I find an obsession with flags to be a singificant sign of a country and its government's weakness. Of having nothing to be proud of, so the attention is directed to a symbol that stands for whatever those who get invested in it want it to, without having to meaningfully do anything to make the country itself worthy of pride... A coward's security blanket, which is why so many prime ministers like to cower beneath it.
I do think that’s a valid point, and I certainly don’t mean to suggest that flags shouldn’t be used for anything, ever. I think my view of the use of the flag in the GBR livery is somewhat influenced by 2 factors: 1) we currently have to live in towns and cities with tatty union flags (usually upside down) tied to every other lamp-post, which looks awful, and everyone knows it’s an anti-immigrant statement (even those who pretend they don’t) so I’m feeling pretty sick of the thing, and 2) the GBR livery itself (regardless of the inclusion of the flag) is horrible - although in fairness, today I saw a doctored image of one where the red/white bits had been removed from the two centre cars of a 4-car EMU, leaving them just on the end cars and the centre cars just blue with white doors, and it looked massively better - so perhaps there’s hope).
It looks like, national flags are nowadays used to try bringing back something which has been gone. This can be bringing the state of a country back to what is was used to be, or in the case of GBR, bringing back the era of British Railways. The "funny" thing is, in a lot of cases, governments are changing things, saying it will be better and then people realize that it has not gotten any better but worse instead. So in those cases people are using their national flag to protest and persuade the government to restore what has been gone. However, in case of GBR, the government itself seems to try bringing back something they destroyed themselves. They'e now trying to convince people with a flag, the period of the great Bristish Railways is coming back and it's even in the name.
I don't think it is that difficult to use information screens. Most European countries do things that way.
A pedant writes: The island is simply Britain - Great Britain is the political entity comprising England, Wales and Scotland together with most of the offshore islets. So it's the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland. We now return you to our TSW coverage
I think among other things, one source of controversy for this GBR livery is the fact it's actually rare (to my knowledge) that a national train operator uses the country's flag on the livery so overtly, they rather tend to use national colours here and there but BR didn't use the flag, DB in Germany doesn't use it also (it's red and in the past it used to be cream and blue), in France I think SNCF does use blue and white colours but not the flag directly, same goes for NS in the Netherlands and RENFE in Spain.
I’m not getting involved in the political conversation but you are wrong about that. The island is Great Britain. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Britain
Oddly enough the other one I can think of which makes significant use of the national flag is the ScotRail ‘saltire’ livery.
I think people are mainly getting offended over bad design. What's happened here is that someone with a political message to send, and no knowledge of livery design, has decided to shoehorn the flag into being the central element of the livery specification, rather than just including a wink to the national colours like we had with NSE back in the day. As far as I'm concerned, putting the same livery on everything is little more than a very expensive step backwards for the general public, who after 50+ years of sectorisation and then privatisation have become used to seeing different visual identities and hearing different operators being announced for the different services they use. I'm also struggling to understand how GBR can justify, in the current context, spending approximately £10k per rail vehicle as opposed to just keeping the existing liveries and replacing the current operator's logo. Assuming they're going for a full, network-wide brand we're looking at a £100m+ vanity operation to vinyl wrap 14.000+ passenger vehicles, assuming the Welsh and Scottish stock stay as they are. As someone who left the UK 15 years ago and is outside looking in, to me the GBR livery has the same design features as this sort of thing, where the designer forgot it was a train and made no effort to separate colours that clash, such as red and blue.
