British Rail Class 52 - Liveries

Liveries

When the initial batch of Westerns was being built in 1961-2, British Rail was considering a new unified corporate colour scheme but had not yet made a final decision on what it would be. As a result, D1000 was rolled out of Swindon Works in November 1961 painted in Desert Sand. Initially the numbers, borne on the left hand cab when viewed from the side, were painted in white but soon individual numbers and letters, looking like they were cast but apparently made of wood, were fitted. This was in turn replaced by the final design of cast nameplate and numberplate; metal with a black background. This livery was later altered by the addition of a small yellow warning panel and black roof. After this, D1001 was delivered in all over maroon livery with yellow buffer beams and D1002-D1004 in all over green and small yellow warning panel. The remaining deliveries were all in maroon, with small yellow warning panels after D1010 and D1043 of the Crewe built locomotives. Exceptions to this were the initial Crewe-built batch D1035-D1038 which were in green with red backgrounds to the nameplates and D1015, outshopped in the experimental "golden ochre" livery with small yellow warning panels. On one end of D1015, the yellow panel was embellished by the addition of a yellow band which extended sideways from each of the top corners and round and onto the cabside for a short distance, resembling a T shape.

After the adoption of Rail Blue with full yellow ends in 1966 (D1048 was the first of the class painted in this livery in 1966), for some unexplained reason a small batch of locos (D1017, D1030, D1036, D1037, D1043, D1047 and D1057) received this variant married to small yellow warning panels, D1030 even carried red buffer beams for a short while. All other repaints were with full yellow ends which extended from the body line above the buffer beam up to the base of the window frames, along the sill of the cab-side windows onto the vertical end reveal. The valance above the cab windows on the front was also painted yellow, leaving the window frames in their base aluminium. The drive to repaint the locomotives in "Corporate Blue" was outstripped by the safety directive dictating full yellow ends for all powered vehicles and some locomotives ran for a time with their original maroon bodies and full yellow ends.

The last loco to be repainted into Rail Blue was D1046, outshopped from Swindon in May 1971. Some early photographs of the blue livery give it a more metallic shade which is even more evident on the locos with small yellow panels. This has been referred to in the past as "chromatic blue". This however is likely just to be a photographic anomaly with early colour film. It is commonly accepted amongst Western enthusiasts in recent years that none of the class or any other British Rail locomotive of the period were ever painted with a metallic paint.