British Rail Brand Names - Timeline of Brands

Timeline of Brands

Under the Transport Act 1962, responsibility for the state railway operation, British Railways, was transferred from being a trade name and subsidiary of the British Transport Commission, to a separate public corporation, under the British Railways Board.

As the last steam locomotives were being withdrawn (completed in 1968) under the 1955 Modernisation Plan, the corporation's public name was re-branded in 1965 as British Rail, which introduced the double-arrow symbol, a standard typeface (named "Rail Alphabet") and the BR blue livery, applied to nearly all locomotives and rolling stock.

The first major BR sub-brand to appear was InterCity brand. This was augmented with the InterCity 125 brand in 1976, in conjunction with the introduction of the InterCity 125 High Speed Train.

In the 1980s under 'sectorisation', the BR Blue identity was phased out, as the organisation was converted from a regional structure to a sector based structure. The Intercity brand was relaunched, and new passenger brands Network SouthEast and Regional Railways introduced, with these divisions also introducing many sub-brands. Freight operations were split into the Trainload Freight, Railfreight Distribution and Rail Express Systems sectors.

In the late 1980s and early 1990s, new multiple-unit train designs being introduced to replace rolling stock also brought new brand names, often linked to other branding exercises, such as the Networkers built for Network SouthEast.

In the 1990s, BR created the European Passenger Services (EPS) division, to run passenger services through the Channel Tunnel, under the Eurostar brand. After construction delays, this was operated from 1994, until it passed to the London and Continental Railways consortium in 1996 as Eurostar (U.K.) Ltd..

In preparation for privatisation, the freight sectors were further split into smaller business units, as regional splits of Trainload Freight, or further splits along customer market, such as inter-modal traffic, each with their own branding. With almost all freight businesses going straight to EWS, most of these brands were short lived.