BRITISH RAILWAYS’ FIRST YEAR
Liveries old and new on a Midland ‘3P’
From January 1 1948, the ‘Big Four’ ceased to exist. In their place came the newly nationalised British Railways. Things did not change overnight and in many respects – to the casual observer at least – little appeared to change. It would be three whole years before the first of 999 BR Standard locomotives, ‘7MT’ No. 70000 Britannia, would enter traffic, and until the Standards came on stream, things carried on much as they had before, with a variety of pre-Grouping and ‘Big Four’ locomotives holding sway on Britain’s railways, just as they had for the last quarter-century. Instead, the early years of nationalisation would be ones of evolution rather than revolution, as the British Railways Board evaluated its inheritance, seeking to appropriate best practices from LMS, LNER, GWR and Southern locomotive design. There was a lot of confusion in that early BR period, as nearly 20,000 steam locomotives inherited by BR slowly assumed their new nationalised identities. This resulted in some unusual hybrid liveries, with engines carrying BR numbers but still wearing ‘Big Four’ liveries, and vice-versa. Ex-Midland Railway ‘3P’ class 4-4-0 No. M741 is the epitome of this – a pre-Grouping design bearing a ‘Big Four’ smokebox numberplate but with ‘British Railways’ lettering. Pictured at Derby shed on January 30 1948, just a month into the new era, the Johnson 4-4-0 would last just three more years in service before withdrawal in 1951 from Templecombe. Some engines carried their ‘Big Four’ guises for many years before assuming
their new BR identities, while others earmarked for early withdrawal under the new regime would carry neither a BR livery nor number before they went for scrap. One of the former is Collett ‘2251’ 0-6-0 No. 3217. Were it not for the words ‘British Railways’ crudely chalked on the smokebox door, there would be no clues that this scene was recorded in the BR era. Former GWR locomotives never received BR five-digit numbers and retained their distinctive cast iron and brass numberplates almost until the end of Western Region steam, as it was too expensive to replace them.