It becomes it when people react negatively to things which are normal in any healthy country, like the head of government or their ministers standing in front of the flag of the country they serve, or naming a national industry after the country.
Err, infrastructure people have called the rails that move, switches (short for switch rails) for years and years and years.
The problem isn't naming a state industry after the country—I don't think anyone had a problem with "British Railways" or "British Steel". The problem comes with the "Great" in "Great British Railways" being ambigious. It's presumably intended to be a purely geographical designation for "the railways on the island of Great Britain", not even named after the country, as there is no country of "Great Britain". But we're all too used of the way that everything the politicians or the marketing people in the Anglo-American world get their hands on these days has to be described by the use of (meaningless) superlatives, and "Great British Railways" has too much of that in it (rather like the "Great British Breakfast"). (As for Johnson and co. standing in their blue-painted room in front of their state flags, well, I'm afrtaid it doesn't quite have the impact of the present-day Czar of All the Russias posed in front of his state flags in the grand halls of the Kremlin.)
If you have a passport look at the cover: "The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland".
"May not be a country but it is [a] distinct legal definiton ..." It's precisely the distinction between a country and a state that matters so much in all the debates about devolution, Scottish independence, and so on. If you want to argue that there's no difference, then why are there separate sports teams for England, Scotland, and Wales in some international competitions when there's only ever one team for, say, France. (And what about the one team for all Ireland for some events — how does that fit in?)
The boundaries used for sports teams are not necessarily those used for countries. Welsh cricketers play for England. All four countries in the UK compete under the same banner in the Olympics (though some from Northern Ireland may elect to compete for Ireland). In football Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland have separate teams but for rugby union its a single Irish team. Berwick Rangers play in the Scottish football league, but Gretna Green has in the competed in the FA Cup.
Great Britain is the name of the island that forms the bulk of Scotland, Wales and England. The name of the country is United Kingdom.
What is material is that the boundaries of states and countries are not necessarily co-terminous.
Fits well with GBRf
Looks like a fairly amateur effort to me. There was a very brief trend for operators to go with that rather nasty curvy project-mapping style of map about 15 years ago. Everything official has gone back to either geographically accurate, or straight lines since then though.This might not be the best thread, but the general thread on G.B.R is not open. Recently new stylised maps have appeared on Wikipedia for some of the Train Operating Companies, with a BR double arrow in some relationship to franchise colours, eg 2 examples below. Are these just someone playing about with Wikipedia or do they have any basis in where the branding is going? If the latter would imply that the ScotRail spot livery / logo is going, which is a bit daft given its purpose was to stop regular changes of livery and logo on the ScotRail network!
