London Banter - View Single Post

Jim Brittin

In article f7ac35bb-4781-477a-b0c2-66ce1666ca94
@o4g2000pra.googlegroups.com, says...
On Jan 28, 6:50*am, Mizter T wrote:
On 28 Jan, 13:22, Graeme Wall wrote:

In message
* * * * * Stephen Furley wrote:

On 28 Jan, 12:35, Brian Robertson wrote:
What is the history of the totem station name signs? Were they purely a
BR design? Were they first introduced straight after nationalisation?
Were they an adaptation of an existing design (As in the LNER brakevan
becoming the BR standard).

The shape was pure BR, but the idea of the name on a bar passing
through some sort of shape was used previously by a number of
railways, the SR targets are probably the closest to the BR totems,
but there are also the LT roundel signs, and at least one railway had
diamond shaped ones, but I cannot remember who.

LT again, before the roundels. *Actually, strictly speaking I think it was
only the Metropolitan, not LT as a whole. *The roundel was adopted about
1908.

There was no LT before the roundel. The roundel first appeared in
1908, when the various underground railway companies agreed to use the
term Underground, the 'UndergrounD' logotype and also use a bar and
circle device for station name boards. That's all the underground
railway companies apart from the Metropolitan Railway, who decided to
go their own way in 1914 with the diamond device.

Just for the record the Metropolitan diamond device was also in use on
the Northern City Line [which once was once part of the Metropolitan
system] and a green version on the East London Line. These were still
in use in the 50's.