When the Amalgamation of Railways Act was passed in 1921, it represented a complete reversal of policy on behalf of the British government. For as long as railways had existed, successive governments and, by extension, the British people had set their faces against any moves to amalgamate the dozens of companies then in existence. It was the dread spectre of monopoly that prevented all but the most anodyne of joinings. Even as recently as 1908, the proposed combination of the Great Northern, Great Central and Great Eastern Railways had provoked a furore in parliament before the proposal was withdrawn. What caused the change of opinion was the First World War.
When war came in 1914, it did not find the railways unprepared. The Railway Executive Committee had already been formed in 1912, to plan ahead should a state of emergency be declared, making it expedient for the Government to take control of the railways under the Regulation of the Forces Act 1871. The REC immediately took over the administration of the British railway system, nominally under the control of the President of the Board of Trade (at that time Winston Churchill), and from 1919 under the new Ministry of Transport and its Minister Sir Eric Geddes. Control was not handed back until August 1921.
Operations by the REC during the war went very well indeed, and showed all concerned what could be achieved under State control. Even Churchill was heard to remark that perhaps Nationalisation might be a good thing. However, after the war, the government backed away from this idea. Nevertheless something had to be done; the railways were in a run-down state, with a huge backlog of maintenance and repair, and owed millions of pounds by the Government. The proposal eventually accepted was to group the old companies into four new privately-owned companies. The Railways Act received the Royal Assent on 19th August 1921, only four days after the REC relinquished control. The old companies would cease to exist by 1st July 1923 at the latest. As it happened, all but a few were absorbed into the new companies by 1st January of that year. Some amalgamations pre-empted the "Grouping", as it came to be called, for example the Hull & Barnsley was absorbed into the North Eastern in 1922, the same year that the London & North Western joined with the Lancashire & Yorkshire.
The four groups created were the London Midland & Scottish Railway (LMS), the Great Western Railway (GWR), the Southern Railway (SR) and the London & North Eastern Railway (LNER). Joint railways such as the Midland & Great Northern, Somerset & Dorset and Cheshire Lines remained unaffected, as they were still jointly administered, albeit by new grouped companies.
Part Two: LNER green locomotive livery 1923 - 28
The LNER was the second largest of the "Big Four" (as they were immediately dubbed) after the LMS, but its revenue was the lowest, and it relied most heavily on goods traffic. It was fortunate that many of the lines grouped as the LNER, which included the GNR, GER, GCR, NER, H&B, North British and Great North of Scotland, had already worked extensively together, and the amalgamation went much more smoothly than it did for the LMS. Ralph Wedgewood of the NER became General Manager, Herbert Nigel Gresley of the GNR was appointed Chief Mechanical Engineer, and William Whitelaw of the NBR became Chairman.
The new company was keen on presenting a unified and neat appearance to the travelling public. One of the first tasks was to decide on locomotive colour, and to this end several experiments were presented to the Directors, at York in January 1923, and at Marylebone in February. The choice from the existing companies grouped in the LNER was limited. The NER used a light green, the GNR a mid-green, the GCR a dark green and the NBR a strange brown/green for their passenger engines, while the H&B and GNoS used black. The GER had abandoned its glorious ultramarine blue for grey, as had the GNR for its goods engines. Other goods engines were black.
The decision was taken to use the GNR green on the upper portions and wheels of locomotives, lined in black and white, but without the darker green edging. Below the footplate was to be in black, lined in vermilion, as for NER engines. The classes to be painted green were limited to tender engines only, with wheels 6' 3" diameter and over, except for the Scottish constituents where (because of a tendency to use smaller wheels) the diameter was 6' 0" and over. However, in one case (ex-NBR Class D36) a diameter of 5' 7" was accepted, due to the engines' status. The ex-NER Class X1 and X2 singles were another exception. Other classes were to be black, lined in vermilion, and these will be dealt with in the next part of the series.
The new standard paint was supplied by Williamson's of Ripon, a firm that most railway companies did business with, and still do. The paint was officially described as "Great Northern standard light green", but has been called "grass green" and "apple green" by well-meaning but misguided commentators and enthusiasts. The colour is darker than these names would imply, and I will refer to it simply as LNER engine green. It was a chrome green, made up from prussian blue and chrome yellow and had a slightly "olive" look to it, although that term should be used sparingly. The fact that the paint company supplied the same paint to each Works contradicts the oft-quoted suggestion that the LNER engine green used at Darlington and Stratford was lighter, something I have long doubted.
The lettering design adopted was to have the initials of the company in 7½" characters placed above the number in 12" numerals on both tenders and tanks. The sans-serif characters were handsome and easily-read, shaded in a style that owed a lot to the former GNR. On the green livery the transfers were gilt, shaded to the right and below in red and black. Thin white lines picked out highlights and edges. The original numbers were retained at first and so during 1923 a fascinating array of styles was visible on a number of engines as paint shop foremen received their instructions, only to have them revised shortly afterwards. The first lettering in general use from March 1923 was "L. & N. E. R." including full stops. This could be seen in the new transfers (or sometimes hand-painted) on paintwork in the pre-Grouping colours. Existing numberplates were left alone on cabs or bunkers where they did not interfere with the new scheme. As the new standard was applied at the Works, the old company colours made way for the new green or black, with the new lettering as described above. However, changes were occurring rapidly and from May 1923 the full stops were omitted from the initials, resulting in just "L & N E R" placed above the numbers. Even this was short-lived, as from June the ampersand disappeared, and the more visually satisfying "L N E R" at last became official.
The final revision during this transitional stage was the adoption in September 1923 of a very small suffix to the engine number denoting the constituent company: D for ex-NER engines (including H&B engines), N for ex-GNR, C for ex-GCR, E for ex-GER, B for ex-NBR, and S for ex-GNoS engines.
In February 1924, a new numbering scheme was imposed. Ex-NER engines retained their numbers, but GNR numbers were raised by 3000, GCR numbers by 5000, GNoS numbers by 6800, GER numbers by 7000 and NBR numbers by 9000. At last a standard LNER scheme could be applied to all its engines. A new numberplate, based on an old NER design, was introduced to replace the various old ones. As the numbers were already highly visible on tenders, this elliptical plate was very small indeed, having the number centrally, the full name of the company over it, and the works of origin and date below. The plate was brass, the lettering and rim polished, with a red background.
LNER engine green was applied to boilers, splashers, cab fronts and sides, tender sides and rear and wheels. Smokeboxes, footplates and all other areas of the engine were black. Handrails were left bright, although it was actually specified that cab and tender handrails should be green. Boiler bands were black, edged with a 3/16" white line. Body panels such as cabs, splashers and tenders were edged with black, again with a 3/16" white line. The remaining decoration was the 2" wide black lining on the tender, fine-lined with 3/16" white as usual. Wheels had black tyres lined in white and black axle ends, ringed in white. Stratford Works departed from the standard by lining the rear edges of tenders, and including rounded corners to the white lining just as in GER days. It also painted the decorative valances of the "Claud Hamilton" 4-4-0s (D14, 15 and 16) and "1500" 4-6-0s (B12) green, lined in black and white as for the rest of the body, with polished brass beading.
The black frames and valances of the engine and tender were lined in 3/16" red (vermilion), generally ½" from the edge. At Darlington, the practice of painting cylinders green continued as it had in NER days, while all the other Works followed the official specification of unlined black. The inner faces of the frames and the motion were red (vermilion), as were bufferbeams. These were edged in black, with white fine-lining, but buffer casings were plain black. Lettering was 4½" high in gold, shaded in black and brown in the standard format "Nş [hook] 4444" for example, but only on the front bufferbeam.
Also on the front bufferbeam was painted the engine classification, which was based on the GNR system, where the wheel arrangement was represented by a letter, and the specific class by a number. It was an excellent and memorable system, and it is a pity the other grouped companies did not adopt it. At first only the ex-NER works at Gateshead and Darlington applied it, and even then using ex-NER classifications, or their own ideas, for example "CLASS [hook] 4.6.2", but from 1932 the standard classes were applied, for example "CLASS [hook] A1", in 1½" white letters along the bottom of the bufferbeam. From 1938 this was approved for use at all the LNER's paintshops.
The painting depicts an ex-GNR 4-4-2 "large Atlantic", LNER Class C1 No.4444, one of the Atlantics which regularly hauled Pullman trains, as running in the 1924 - 28 period.
REFERENCES:
Locomotives of the LNER Part 1 (Railway Correspondence & Travel Society)
Railway Liveries 1923 - 1947 Brian Haresnape (Ian Allan)
Locomotives at the Grouping 2 H.C.Casserley & S.W.Johnston (Ian Allan)
LNER Album Volume One Brian Stephenson (Ian Allan)
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