…which ones should you choose? Looking at the timetable, it seems like we have 3 versions in 3 liveries: 85-91 89-96 93+ in Provincial Orange Skipper colours. Based on the years, I presume that only 85-91 is actually appropriate for BPO, which leaves me with a choice of three liveries. Are all of the liveries equally appropriate for all of the services? Would some be seen more often on one rather than the other type of service? The only things I managed to gather online were that Orange seems to have connection to Manchester (GMPTE) and that the Skippers originally came from the Western Region. I’d love if the people knowledgeable about UK railroading could give me some background here
Orange for Manchester/Leeds services, Provincial for everything else (also appropriate for Manchester/Leeds).
Skippers were originally for use in Devon/Cornwall but it was soon discovered they weren't exactly suitable so they were sent elsewhere. I guess it's not unrealistic for them to appear on any of the services if they were brought up to the northern regions.
Same with the GMPTE Pacers, they had a tendency of showing up in random places like this one on an Ormskirk Preston service https://www.flickr.com/photos/martynhilbert/51787501821/ Skipper was much the same really, just randomly show up sometimes such as this one on the Omrskirk line https://www.flickr.com/photos/martynhilbert/16679510510/
Whoops I missed that one, it’s as Nick stated - they were briefly sent to work the western region before being sent back North. Realistically you should use this in WCL, however they weren’t immediately repainted when they arrived back in the North, so you could have rarely seen this around a few cities.
It wouldn't surprise me if considering that at that time the Pacers were still only considered a temporary thing, there was some part of the system that was basically saying 'as long as we have X amount of Pacers back in the yard at the end of the day, who cares what colour it is?' The Skippers were a unique case of course, all painted for the western region and then kicked out very quickly and redistributed across the network so they could really appear anywhere. Pacers were a mixup throughout their working lives, even when Regional Railways came into being there was still a unique livery for GMPTE RR units and that likely got mixed up in the same way.
