There was a time in the mid-20th. century when all British trains (with a few exceptions) were painted either green or black according to status. A shortage of labour to work as cleaners invariably led to them all looking alike as the layers of untouched grime accumulated. In the 1970s the favoured colour was British Rail blue. This was an early example of a corporate branding decision and as such was rigidly imposed. But those days have long passed. Rail franchising encouraged every operator to brand their trains with distinctive colour schemes. Some chose relatively sober colour combinations to project a reputation for safety and reliability, while others went for high intensity palettes as if to suggest the excitement of travel would be equal to the visual drama on the exterior of the train. The latter strategy rapidly predominated and increasingly bizarre colour choices were to be seen across the network. In recent times a proliferation of graphic devices and computer processed photographic imagery, applied in the form of vinyl wraps, have led to an explosion of discordant visual confusion on the side panels of the nation’s passenger trains. Britain’s privatised rail operators (there are some exceptions) have led the way in this trend even though the extent to which they compete for patronage is more notional than real.
European railways have retained their state owned national networks, each with their individual identity and colour. Netherland’s yellow, Germany’s red and France’s blue were once ubiquitous but now are in retreat as privately owned operators take advantage of the EU’s insistence that state owned monopolies are opened up to the private sector. The images below have been extracted from just 8 seconds of video of a passing train in Lichtenberg, Berlin and by chance they form a series of mostly abstract compositions in which is embedded a dark vision of a mobile phone call. And it’s the mobile phone that enables these visual experiments at the same time as it removes the possibility of direct perception of the visible world - a concern that much exercises the minds of those who believe that technology is undermining active participation in our own existence in favour of a lifetime of curating.
