Stations rebranded to Great British Railways design / Rail Alphabet 2

[nlogax]

Well it looks "right" to me, the font weight looks bang-on.

Looks to me like original RA.

 

[185]

Does the viaduct not represent Castlefield towards Ardwick?

Looks more like Ribblehead, that tall.

 

[Bletchleyite]

Manchester Airport is anything but pleasant, but unless I want to pay Avanti a small fortune to get to Heathrow, I don't have much choice.

You might not, but most people have a car available to them and it doesn't take much for them to switch to it.

Looks to me like original RA.

Does to me too. RA2 looks a lot more modern.

 

[nlogax]

Does to me too. RA2 looks a lot more modern.

Going by other photos I've seen of the refurbished Malton station the entirety of its signage remains in original RA. It's just been cleaned.

 

[Domh245]

GBR is a bloody transport service, I'm not going to ask then to redecorate my living room.

Look at it this way, one of your candidates (both clean shaven and equally qualified) has a nice crisp white shirt and the other is an Austin Powers lookalike, who gets the job?

Good grief, I don't know if you're deliberately missing the point or not. I'm not expecting them to go to great lengths producing unique and interesting designs, or to produce a 60s tribute complete with bright colours, I'm just asking them to look like they've made even the slightest bit of effort.

As it is, it just looks like GBR have done nothing more than just fire up word and hammer out station names in the default font. Yes I know that it's a special font, which has been developed to be supremely readable at great cost and effort, but to most of the public it'll just look like "generic sans-serif" and thus entirely 'stock settings'. I'd personally be reasonably content with just a single bar of monochromatic colour along the bottom of the sign, no need to go overboard - just make it look like you've actually thought about it. Even if they have put great thought into it, it doesn't look like it, and gives a bad impression

However in answer to your question, the candidate with the crisp white shirt seems like they'd make a better impression than someone rocking up in a flamboyant suit with frilly shirt and neckerchief, at least for an office role.

 

[Bletchleyite]

Good grief, I don't know if you're deliberately missing the point or not. I'm not expecting them to go to great lengths producing unique and interesting designs, or to produce a 60s tribute complete with bright colours, I'm just asking them to look like they've made even the slightest bit of effort.

As it is, it just looks like GBR have done nothing more than just fire up word and hammer out station names in the default font. Yes I know that it's a special font, which has been developed to be supremely readable at great cost and effort, but to most of the public it'll just look like "generic sans-serif" and thus entirely 'stock settings'. I'd personally be reasonably content with just a single bar of monochromatic colour along the bottom of the sign, no need to go overboard - just make it look like you've actually thought about it. Even if they have put great thought into it, it doesn't look like it, and gives a bad impression

Exactly.

TfW have done this - the same sort of thing with the text in RA2 and the BR sign in the bottom right would look great. Not overpowering, but like some thought has gone into it.

Wrexham General station sign in TfW style, credit George Jones on Charlie Hulme's site nwrail.org.uk

However in answer to your question, the candidate with the crisp white shirt seems like they'd make a better impression than someone rocking up in a flamboyant suit with frilly shirt and neckerchief, at least for an office role.

Yes, true, but offices of that nature are deliberately boring, as that is the culture that they are aiming to create - you want process-following drones. Office environments requiring creativity such as tech startups tend to think very differently about dress and decoration.

 

[Peter Sarf]

Do both. The whole station environment package has to be welcoming, clean and tidy. All the things none of them were in 1980s BR days that people hark back to when supporting this drab, boring signage scheme.



You miss the point.

"The station is clean, tidy and attractive in appearance, that makes me feel safe, happy and comfortable using the train".

Is your house perchance magnolia and off-brown carpets throughout as per the "standard" rental house look? Inoffensive but utterly boring. If so this might explain your view, if not why don't you want stations looking as attractive as your lounge?

I have stopped at Rugby services a few times recently, a brand new site. It is bright and attractive, with clear but colourful signage - I'm sure it wasn't Stenning that did it as he sticks to buses but it's that sort of look. One thing that occurred to me is "why aren't railway station concourses this nice?" Perhaps you'd prefer the drab concrete of Charnock Richard, Watford Gap etc?

Stenning's marketing package for London Midland was an absolute masterpiece, making a boring commuter railway really attractive looking to leisure traffic. LNR's is decidedly amateurish in comparison. All white would just be "right, it's a boring commuter service, Avanti (or your car) is over there".

Why don't Ryanair just paint their planes white as it's cheapest? Because even to a rock-bottom budget operation marketing and branding is really important.

Leave the signage as simple as possible to read. Yes stations can look uninviting. So spend the extra on decorating, removing weeds (trees hanging out of walls) and get rid of tagging.

The tagging does far far more harm than a plain white sign might. Please, just leave the signs as easy to read.

As for home decor. If i am living there I will decorate it to my taste. If I am selling the house/flat i will decorate in light and neutral colours to attract as many as possible. Not some fancy scheme that divides opnion.

The actual reason that books tend to be black and white is because it's cheap and quick with just the one ink, one set of printing equipment, 1/4 the print time of a full CYMK print etc. On the scale of a book publisher, saving that time and money absolutely makes sense. On something like this re-branding where you're printing on the order of 50,000 pieces of signage (~2500 stations, 20 signs on average per station) with a shelf life of at least a decade, you can stomach the additional production cost and time of adding a small amount of colour (especially if you just add the one colour) to make the sign less utterly drab.

A plain white sign with text on screams "we can't be arsed" - which is not really the sort of image that you want to project.

The signs do not bother me - I just want to read and comprehend them. What screams we cannot be bothered about are appearance is the weeds growing out of brickwork and the miles and miles of tagging.

It's a bloody station sign for goodness sake, with the advent of GBR there is no need for branding. If I'm stood at station "A" I'm unlikely to walk to station "B" because their signs are "nicer".

Easy to read is the priority and that ties-in nicely with cheapest to produce, end of story.

YES.

GBR is a bloody transport service, I'm not going to ask then to redecorate my living room.

Look at it this way, one of your candidates (both clean shaven and equally qualified) has a nice crisp white shirt and the other is an Austin Powers lookalike, who gets the job?

Yes.

You might not, but most people have a car available to them and it doesn't take much for them to switch to it.



Does to me too. RA2 looks a lot more modern.

Well I have been on a few trips recently.
First by rail because there was an offer on.
Second by car because there was no offer on and we benefitted from a bit of route flexibility.
We have two more trips comming up - by rail because there was a cheap offer on. One of them pre-Covid would have been by air - oh hang on how fancy are aiport signs ?.

The signs did not affect my choice at all. Though I might get vexed if I miss my station because I did not see the sign - I tend to ignore the fancy stuff - I want facts.

Exactly.

TfW have done this - the same sort of thing with the text in RA2 and the BR sign in the bottom right would look great. Not overpowering, but like some thought has gone into it.

Wrexham General station sign in TfW style, credit George Jones on Charlie Hulme's site nwrail.org.uk



Yes, true, but offices of that nature are deliberately boring, as that is the culture that they are aiming to create - you want process-following drones. Office environments requiring creativity such as tech startups tend to think very differently about dress and decoration.

Bit of an aside but I have a problem with Bi-lingual signs. It slows me down a lot. I have missed a lot of road signs in Wales. So A different colour font or surround for each language might help me to ignore the language I cannot read. That is where colour has a use - to help inform not to embellish.

 

[Bletchleyite]

Bit of an aside but I have a problem with Bi-lingual signs. It slows me down a lot. I have missed a lot of road signs in Wales. So A different colour font or surround for each language might help me to ignore the language I cannot read. That is where colour has a use - to help inform not to embellish.

BR for years put the Welsh in green and the English in black which made it fairly clear.

 

[takno]

However in answer to your question, the candidate with the crisp white shirt seems like they'd make a better impression than someone rocking up in a flamboyant suit with frilly shirt and neckerchief, at least for an office role.

When I'm hiring for office-based roles I wouldn't say I differentiate based on what people are wearing or stubble very much at all.

Don't really understand why anybody would be put off by carefully-considered plain signage, which has been designed to convey all the useful information without some fashion-disaster logo or colour-scheme.

 

[jon0844]

Exactly, it's a marketing faux-pas. If it looks rubbish, people will think it is rubbish. And one thing 1980s BR with its mucky white signage and drab blue and grey trains looked was rubbish. It's amazing just how basic and poorly looked after it was compared with today, though to be fair that's also true of most areas of life.

Even Regional Railways days were a bit drab. If you can find a copy, watch Victoria Wood's Great Railway Journey - the whole thing was just depressing, a railway in decline doing the bare minimum it could be bothered to do, and a British holiday industry in its death throes. So different to today despite low-cost airlines being something that emerged rather later than it was filmed.

I think this is something some people didn't realise/appreciate when private companies took over. Private companies need to make money, and to make money isn't just about doing the bare minimum and cutting everything to the bone.. you need to invest to grow a business, which then makes you more money.

Coming up with new brands, more innovative promotions and so on can make people want to travel more. Whatever we think of Virgin, they knew how to market themselves. I certainly can't see the DfT wanting or caring about stuff like this, which could be a real problem.

 

[Dr Hoo]

It just seems so random and done on a 'come back later to finish' basis. I happened to be at Greenbank today. Regional Railways, old Northern, new Northern and new GBR all in evidence, plus a totally random Railtrack font on the clearly-visible signalbox. I did spot an old BR 'Way Out' sign with a blue arrow too. A complete mess.

(For those who aren't familiar with Greenbank, the old station building and forecourt is now a church, with its own signage as well.)

Sadly photos are too 'big' to attach.

How many branches of ASDA still have Associated Dairies branding in full view?

 

[Grumpy Git]

How many branches of ASDA still have Associated Dairies branding in full view?

Fair point, but if I'm at my local station, I just get the train to my destination, it's not like shopping, there is no comparison (and no "posher" (rail) alternative).

 

[Tio Terry]

Whilst I can fully understand what's being said about branding, one thing that most certainly needs to be considered is that GBR will be very heavily funded to the tune on several £B by the taxpayer - somewhat unlike a successful brand. Customer perception is very much part of branding - as has been shown by many of the posts on this subject. Will GBR want to risk creating a brand that may well appear indulgent or excessive to their benefactors? Or will they want to appear to be being conscious of the support they are receiving from the taxpayer and therefore financially prudent?

Stations signages primary purpose is wayfinding, helping people find out where they need to go and to find the facilities and services they need. It needs to be simple to use and easy to read, that has to be the main purpose of anything that is provided.

 

[Grumpy Git]

If they want to "jazz-up" GBR, they should allow locomotives to be sponsored by corporations like in Switzerland, it's just a pity we don't have any LHS nowadays though!

 

[Peter Sarf]

I think this is something some people didn't realise/appreciate when private companies took over. Private companies need to make money, and to make money isn't just about doing the bare minimum and cutting everything to the bone.. you need to invest to grow a business, which then makes you more money.

Coming up with new brands, more innovative promotions and so on can make people want to travel more. Whatever we think of Virgin, they knew how to market themselves. I certainly can't see the DfT wanting or caring about stuff like this, which could be a real problem.

I get that private companies want to portray an image and grow. But this is the railways. All these private comapanies were making a profit out of the subsidy they received from the government.

Whilst I can fully understand what's being said about branding, one thing that most certainly needs to be considered is that GBR will be very heavily funded to the tune on several £B by the taxpayer - somewhat unlike a successful brand. Customer perception is very much part of branding - as has been shown by many of the posts on this subject. Will GBR want to risk creating a brand that may well appear indulgent or excessive to their benefactors? Or will they want to appear to be being conscious of the support they are receiving from the taxpayer and therefore financially prudent?

Stations signages primary purpose is wayfinding, helping people find out where they need to go and to find the facilities and services they need. It needs to be simple to use and easy to read, that has to be the main purpose of anything that is provided.

Yes that is correct and worse still that expensive support was even being lavished on the railways when indulgent signs were the norm !.

 

[Andyh82]

I’m not sure those who want a bit of style and flair, and those who want things just very functional are ever going to agree.

I’m in the first camp, and I agree that London Midland was a stylish brand

Plain black letters on plain white looks like a temporary measure, and I’m not entirely sure why they are rolling it out

 

[Bletchleyite]

How many branches of ASDA still have Associated Dairies branding in full view?

Bletchley Tesco still has the 1987-1995 branding (TESCO in red serif font without the blue underline bits) on the back, you can't see it from the road (which is why they probably left it) but you can see it from...back on topic(ish)...the Marston Vale line. Which itself has LNR branding, there's something about TOCs seeing their least-used stations as most important to brand - the number of times Denton has had new signs is quite notable.

 

[Aictos]

The best signage that's post BR is Brunel signage that was trialed on South West Trains and South Eastern in the London area, it was smart and to the point.

 

[Meerkat]

I feel a lot of people miss the context of why white was chosen as the base colour. A dark colour was an option but after being tested it was determined to blend into the surroundings too much, so they needed one that contrasted with it better and it was either white, or neon colours that did that.

I read that and thought their method was very suspect. They smudged/blurred backgrounds to a kind of average colour and then tested against that. So it would inevitably not be white or lettered and so white would stand out.
In the real world you will have black letters on white where there are loads of examples of black lettering on white. The important bit is not to stand out against a wall as a sign, but to stand out against all the other signs and adverts. Which means brand coloured backrounds such as Southern or SWR (which were clearly station signs) or at least have a brand coloured outline.

 

[hexagon789]

Makes me think if the government took over Tesco, Sainsburys and ASDA and just had a big white sign saying “SHOP” on the front. It’s awful.

Have you not heard of the "British Restaurant"?

(What happens when the government takes over community feeding centres and Churchill is in charge of the naming policy...)

 

[Tio Terry]

I read that and thought their method was very suspect. They smudged/blurred backgrounds to a kind of average colour and then tested against that. So it would inevitably not be white or lettered and so white would stand out.
In the real world you will have black letters on white where there are loads of examples of black lettering on white. The important bit is not to stand out against a wall as a sign, but to stand out against all the other signs and adverts. Which means brand coloured backrounds such as Southern or SWR (which were clearly station signs) or at least have a brand coloured outline.

Has it occured to you that those "smudged/blurred" backgrounds were used to help assess the effectiveness of the new signs to the visually challenged? Wayfinding signage is probably far more import to PRM than it is to the fully able traveller.

 

[krus_aragon]

Honestly, who cares if a crap system is forced to use a particular font or a brand? They might actually prefer to hide their **** behind an 'England and bits of Wales but definitely not Scotland or Northern Ireland pretending it's British' idenity

Are there bits of Wales that have started receiving GBR branding? I thought it was all TfW going up.

 

[Trainfan2019]

If the basic black text on white background worked back in the day then it can still work now.

 

[Dr Hoo]

If the basic black text on white background worked back in the day then it can still work now.

Although I still think that the 1965 British Rail corporate identity and design manual were two of Dr Beeching's greatest legacies it is hard to say that they really 'worked'. Passenger usage remained very subdued through to the the 1980s. Growth only really became evident once the Sectors (and PTEs) started a collection of more assertive branding strategies.

(I know that correlation doesn't necessarily imply causation.)

 

[185143]

Edale-Grindleford (at least) now have GBR signage. As does Chester-le-Street.

I've only really seen it at Northern stations, is there a reason for that?

 

[LowLevel]

Edale-Grindleford (at least) now have GBR signage. As does Chester-le-Street.

I've only really seen it at Northern stations, is there a reason for that?

They appear to have missed a solitary sign at Bamford but yes, that seems right. I suppose the Northern signs are well out of date generally.

 

[Grumpy Git]

Edale-Grindleford (at least) now have GBR signage. As does Chester-le-Street.

I've only really seen it at Northern stations, is there a reason for that?

Its the sum total of the government "levelling-up"!

 

[ic31420]

A colleague of mine (non railway) tells me he was on a station a few weeks ago when he saw a worker pulling off stickers from a Northern Station. What caught is eye was the worker was taking of a plain sticker covering a Northern Branding, he then removed the Northern Branding, applied fresh "new font" Northern Branding and then applied a plain blanking sticker over that to cover it up. Apparently he asked they guy what it was all about and he said he couldn't believe it either. But apparently his company had a deal to rebrand and to debrand so was doing it all at once.

Not sure I believe the story but nothing surprises me these days.

 

[185143]

Padgate has new signage too.

Birchwood however still has the battered FTPE with a blue sticker over said logo signage!

 

[61653 HTAFC]

To all those bemoaning the "dull" black-on-white signage, do you remember back in the early days of SWT when they experimented with blue text on a white background? Within a few months the blue text had faded in the sunlight in many places, leaving barely legible "ghost" text.