On 28 Jan, 19:22, 1506 wrote:

On Jan 28, 9:03*am, wrote:

On Jan 28, 3:39 pm, Mizter T wrote:

possibly be seen as a stylised version of the railway bogie, the
circle being a wheel and the bar being the side frame of the bogie?

Coupling rod and wheel ?

Although a steam coupling rod would hardly be an inspiration to an
electric railway.

IMHO The circle represents a tunnel. *The bar represents a RoW.


Of course the beauty of stylised symbols is that they can represent
all of these things. My comments were specifically in relation to how
the original 'bar and circle' device, which was used on station
nameboards from 1908, came to be - it can be seen here on the platform
of Dover Street station:
http://www.ltmcollection.org/roundel...large=i000020h

Looking at it again I can also imagine the bar as representing a
railway carriage. As I said, it can represent whatever you wish to
read into it.

I dare say there's always the possibility that we're all looking at it
in too narrow a manner, i.e. from the perspective of transport. It
might be instructive to look at other examples of contemporary
'graphic design' (though it wasn't called that) from around the same
time, for example advertising and packaging, and also to spread to net
wider and look at other insignia, for example that derived from the
military.

Then again, perhaps the bar and circle' device was simply hit upon as
an effective way of making the station's nameboard from stand out from
the surrounding profusion of advertising (the circle was red, the bar
blue). Those who are minded to complain about being exposed to a glut
of commercial promotion when travelling by public transport might wish
to bear in mind the possibility that one of the great symbols of
public transport, the roundel, may simply have emerged almost by
accident from the midst of a melee of advertisements.