Paint job

A train passing through Wimbledon at night recently, demonstrating that the new franchise holder for the trains in southwest London is on the case when it comes to paint jobs. The new name has appeared!

I remember being rather surprised at how quickly the Santander livery replaced the Barclays livery on Bullingdons, when the former took over sponsorship from the latter.

In the case of trains at least, not a complete waste of resources, as I rather like the liveries of both Southwest Trains/South Western Railway and Southern - both of which I imagine to be rather smarter than whatever British Rail used to have, although, to be fair, I cannot now remember what that was.

It was also an occasion to ponder on the excitement of the engineer from the Lebanon noticed at reference 1 when she told us that platforms at the new Farringdon station on Crossrail had to be 250m long. If one has a regular commuter train, the sort of thing you might get at Wimbledon, of 10 coaches, it only takes a unit length of 25m to make up the 250m. So what is the unit length?

A bit of poking around with Bing and I decide that a lot of the coaches deployed in and around Epsom were built, quite some time ago, by British Rail Engineering and were called Class 455s. According to their Wikipedia entry (reference 2) the coaches (aka units) are just under 20m long. So maybe Crossrail is going up to 12 unit trains to make the distance, but the bottom line is that 250m is not that special for the length of a railway platform. And you have to walk a lot further than that to get from the northbound Victoria Line platform at Kings Cross to the outside world.

Along the way I was interested to learn that railway rolling stock can be quite old, and a unit can go through several refurbishments before, in the language of Thomas the Tank Engine, it is sent behind the shed. And even then, its more expensive parts might be recycled into more fortunate units.

Also that my 'World Railways' from Jane's was not much good at this sort of thing. It gives you the names and makes of the rolling stock, but is feeble on their specifications. Furthermore, outfits like British Rail Engineering which no longer exist, do not get a mention, despite their long and honourable records. See reference 3.

Reference 1: http://psmv3.blogspot.co.uk/2017/11/bretchel.html.

Reference 2: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_Rail_Class_455.

Reference 3: http://psmv3.blogspot.co.uk/2017/04/train-spotters.html.