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LSWR Livery

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Lucan

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Flipping through TV channels last night I came across a programme about restoring four vintage carriages fo the Llangollen Railway. One was a LSWR coach and the livery was pink upper body sides and chocolate brown lower. It was so unbelievably ghastly that I wonder if this was correct.

In the absence of colour photos from those days, do we really know what those old liveries were? How would we know apart from verbal descriptions? I had imagined that LSWR was chocolate and cream like the GWR, but with perhaps the shades a bit different.

Incidentally, when did the Southern adopt its all-green? Having grown up in Southern territory in the 1960s, I grew to find green rather boring and wished they had something like the chocolate and cream, or the blood and custard, of other regions.
 
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Taunton

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Pretty accurate. I believe the "pink" was known as Salmon.

The Southern Railway worked through a sequence of quite different shades of green for its vehicles during its existence, and the one chosen in BR days was different again.

Green was the favoured colour for locomotives, three of the four post-1923 railways used it for their express locomotives, although the shades again differed. There was a time when all local authority property was painted green as well. With the more primative paint technology and pigments of the era, it apparently weathered well, whereas blue was a challenge until more recent times.
 
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jmh59

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Ghastly is an interesting comment - subjective I realise but having been up close to this carriage (read: having washed it!) I don't consider it such. YMMV! The colours ("salmon pink and dark brown") are given in vol 1 of British Railway Carriages of the 20th Century.
 
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