That seemed to me to fit rather well with the Metro's integrated approach to corporate identity, including the lovely Calvert "M" symbol:
As is the way of these things, the trains have been reliveried over the years and now sport a range of colours in this rather bold style:
The doors always appear in yellow (this is, apparently, something to do with helping people with some vision problems to spot them. Although why they should only need this on trains and not on buses, cars, or indeed buildings is a mystery to me).
The rest of the body is painted in either red, blue or green.
A gang of them side-by-side looks rather colourful:
And the colour scheme works well in action:
I think the red works best, but that could be because I'm a traditionalist.
And it reminds me of the Berlin system, which is always a nice memory (and apposite, considering the Metro is operated by a subsidiary of German state railway Deutsche Bahn).
I think that's probably enough about the Metro for now, don't you?
4 comments:
The cadmium yellow is a relic of Newcastle City Transport, which used it for as long as I can remember on its buses and before that, trams.
I presume the parti-colouring is to identify different routes (though its ages since I was last there to use it); but I don't much care for it aesthetically.
Aren't the trams, not trains!?
There is a hint of BR class 312 about the ends though I think.
I don't know where the line dividing trains from trams is drawn (if it has ever been); but these Tyneside vehicles are larger than the Underground Metropolitan/District stock and no-one that I know of calls them trams. I'm in no doubt: Tyneside metro runs trains!
There is a difference in UK legislation between ordinary ("heavy") rail and light rail -- the latter requiring lower civil engineering standards, lighter vehicles which don't have to be so collision-worthy (because they have a lower top speed), etc.
However, since part of the T&W Metro runs on tracks shared with traditional "heavy rail" services, the Metro vehicles have to be engineered to meet those standards of collision-worthiness. The same applies, I think, to Metropolitan line and Jubilee line trains, etc (although London Underground is sometimes referred to as "heavy metro", which is another confusing term).
Equally, different rules apply to vehicles which at any time engage in street-running -- and those are properly "trams". T&W Metro trains never engage in street-running, always sticking to segregated railway lines (although there was a proposal a while back to extend the network which would have included street-running; I think this was stopped for lack of funding).
And there's a new category emerging, the "tram-train", which is currently not cleared for use in the UK although trials are scheduled to start at some point in an area adjacent to and partly overlapping with the Sheffield tram system. It just means a heavy-duty tram which is also able to operate on traditional heavy rail tracks.
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