Post-war ‘Big Four’

The post-war period is not known for vibrant colour. RICHARD FOSTER presents a guide to the ‘Big Four’s’ final liveries as they tried to restore pre-war glamour in the face of nationalisation.

A guide to the ‘Big Four’s’ final liveries as they tried to restore pre-war glamour in the face of nationalisation.

Seventy years ago, Britain’s railways faced their biggest shake-up. The future of the ‘Big Four’ railway companies - the Great Western, the LMS, the LNER and the Southern - was getting shorter and shorter with every passing month of 1947 for, on January 1 1948, the railways would be owned by the state, not private organisations. Even the Grouping of 1923, 24 years before, had left the railways run by companies and not the Government. Railway history after the Second World War is overshadowed by nationalisation, and 1946 and 1947 are often forgotten about. Technically, the ‘Big Four’ were still under Government control, in the form of the Railway Executive Committee, which had taken command of the railways in September 1939 as war threatened to engulf Europe. But the ‘Big Four’ emerged from the war with optimism. Yes, there was a huge amount of work to do to bring them back up to scratch, as the Second World War had taken a huge toll, but the railways wanted to run at pre-war speeds, and engineers were already working on the next generation of locomotives and rolling stock. Colour played a big part of that renaissance. Locomotives had been painted black out of necessity but, in peace time, tins of coloured paint could be cracked open once again. Some railways unveiled new schemes; others merely modified existing ones. Here’s a run-down of what the railway looked like 70 years ago before, as former GWR fireman Harold Gasson described it, the ‘Big Four’ were “rubber-stamped into anonymity”.