Model Railway Forum

Photos taken in the mid to late fifties are not in colour and therefore it is difficult to judge what the correct colours should be for painted structural items and fixings other than platform fittings etc. I am thinking of items such as water tanks, water columns, yard cranes, relay boxes, doors of line side huts etc and in my case Southern Region central area. My childhood memory is insufficiently accurate to be relied upon. Black, grey, regional green? Obviously in many cases paint will have faded and there is likely to rusting, weathering, and dirtying to impact on the situation but what should be the starting point? Can anyone illuminate please?

Your best bet is to look at well made model layouts. They will have accurate colours.

This is a good example https://www.flickr.com/photos/82421701@N04/44505678324

Hi
When as a young apprentice back in the 1960's with BR Southern - South eastern sector, the Signalling Dept had its own painters. Battleship Grey was used in abundance on colour light signal posts, gantries, line-side apparatus cases etc, In fact almost anything that didn't move or walk was grey!! Semaphore signal post though were always white with a black bottom section. Everything else non signalling tended to be SR Green where the public were or could see it and in non public areas - whatever was to hand!! Often more grey!!! Though inside signal boxes and relay rooms, mess huts etc creamy/yellow was used a lot on the walls. In fact it may have been just cream to start off with but became a more yellow tinted colour due to the large amount of smokers around in those days!

Thank you for the very useful comments. Battleship grey suitably weathered it is then!

Helpfully the Southern Region Chief Civil Engineer produced a series of Painting Information sheets, describing and illustrating every type of building, structure and lineside equipment indicating precisely what colour it was to be painted. Even more fortunately these have been gathered together and published in two book recently, both of which I consider essential reading for anyone modelling the Southern Region.

The first book is SOUTHERN STYLE After Nationalisation, 1948 to 1964 by John Harvey published by the Historical Model Railway Society in 2018 ISBN 978 0 902835 35 1.

The second book, which contains 3 more sheets covering interior schemes, is SOUTHERN NOUVEAU and the Lineside, published by Irwell Press in 2017, ISBN 978 1 911262 02 2.

Southern Nouveau which is the second and enlarged version of this book is a very useful and comprehensive publication which includes numerous photographs and drawings of Southern Railway and Region buildings and lineside structures, large and small.

Some of the painting sheets also appeared in British Railways Illustrated magazine some years ago.

DOH!! Why didn’t I think to look there? Thank you LC&DR - sitting on my bookshelves is you, guessed it- a copy of Southern Nouveau with 40 pages on painting a wide variety of different items. I had bought the book some time ago and obviously have neglected to peruse it through to the last chapter. It is truly brilliant at answering the questions I posed and many more. Another variation of the usual syndrome of buying a new tool only to find you already had one which you had mislaid.

I don't know if there is an equivalent to Southern Nouveau for the other 'Big 4' railway companies. I find this book extremely interesting and useful, and essential reading for anyone modelling the Southern.

Hopefully then the Southern Region Chief Civil Engineer's (P Way person?) instructions were followed and mass amounts of Battle Ship grey that dominated in the 1960's was used correctly! There were 50 to 80 gallons (in 1gall. tins) of the stuff in the S & T painters paint store at Faversham Creek Road Depot! All sitting next to the lead content Red Oxide paint!! All line-side apparatus cases and all colour light signal posts on the Southern South Eastern sector where covered in the stuff, often covering severe rusting in the Dover Marine and other coastal areas!

Grey was certainly used extensively, especially by the S&T for lineside structures, usually those things away from the public gaze, and things that needed to fade into the background. Signal posts of colour lights being a good example. Water cranes, water tank tops, transformers, the girders of metal bridges pipe bridges, and similar structures all got a liberal covering of it. Green was applied on those surfaces that the public came into contact with like the lattice girders of footbridges, columns supporting station canopies etc.

British Rail in the 1970s decided to change all this, although not always for the better. I recall one day at Whitstable and Tankerton the painters arrived to paint the station. It was still in the old Southern Region colours green and cream, and we still had the old BR green & White enamel signs. There was a metal fence along the back of the platforms which was green but the powers that be decided it should be white so that was the painters painted it. We commented that this wasn't a good idea, and sure enough within a month it started to go brown, and looked scruffy. The 'new' Corporate image station signs in white with black lettering went the same way. Somehow Southern green could cope with brake dust far better.