I don't think there's enough art analysis of modern train paint schemes. Sadly I know basically nothing about art, so I can't really fill in the gaps, but I can at least try to get the conversation going.
Now, this is a difficult topic, for two main reasons:
There are a lot of trains. Less than cars, sure, but still, a very considerable amount.
We live in a time where it's gotten really easy to give them all widely different liveries.
Point 2 is surprisingly crucial. It used to be that every train livery was paint, with masking tape carefully applied, and a few stickers for the more complicated parts, letters and numbers. That limited the sheer amount of design you could get on there. Trains in Europe have also become very smooth, with not much in the way of access doors or similar. That means for complex paint schemes, you can now do vinyl wraps, like for cars; functionally you print out a giant sticker (or several) with a giant locomotive and make sure to apply them all straight. Sounds difficult, but there are companies specialised in that. So, want a locomotive with gold and Ode to Joy on the side?
(All pictures by me unless otherwise noted)
Yeah you can just do that. SETG's 193 218 here is the only one with this livery, and hey, at least it's still wearing it. They've changed some details since I took this picture in 2017.
So as an example, I'm picking one type of locomotive and in particular one train company. The locomotive is the Siemens Vectron, and generally speaking it looks like this:
The Vectron is an incredibly successful product by Siemens, introduced in 2008 and it keeps on selling. Locomotive 1750 is almost done and was recently shown off at a publicity event, and the orders are already for about 2700 locomotives. I'm only going to look at the "normal" version of it and ignore weird special versions like "with Diesel engine", "extra cheap" and, of course, "Finnish". With that out the way, the Vectron is an electric locomotive that can run at up to 200 km/h or even 230 km/h (125 or 143 mph), provide up to 6400 MW continuous power, run under any type of electricity common in Europe and in most countries. It's highly modular, so you only get the features you want, and you can add other ones later. Some of them haul passenger trains, in particular it's the most modern passenger locomotive in both the Netherlands and Denmark, but the vast majority haul freight all along the major European corridors. For quite a while there it was actually the only modern electric freight locomotive you could get, as their competitor Bombardier and their TRAXX was busy with software and quality control issues, then busy getting bought by Alstom, then busy with software and quality control issues some more. This seems to be coming to an end, Alstom has won some significant orders and is getting close to actually delivering, and meanwhile Stadler has been doing interesting stuff in the specialty field and they're going mainstream as well; but for now, Vectron is still the default. The lamp housings only come in grey, unless you buy the cheap version, the extra powerful version, or the Finnish version (which also doesn't have the whiskers).
The one in the picture is an internal Siemens test unit to get approval for 230 km/h operations, but for the most part, it represents what the locomotive looks like if you order one and forget to tell Siemens what paint you'd want. This sounds like a joke but it's actually surprisingly common. Most locomotives in Europe these days are bought by leasing companies. Some of them are very concerned about corporate identity and have their own paint schemes that customers can then add their logos to (or cover up, if they pay more), but others don't bother, they expect that the customer will wrap the locomotive anyway. Siemens also apparently always has a few white Vectrons in the assembly line, in case someone needs a locomotive really urgently. The expectation is never that customers keep it white for long, it's that they apply at least logos or big stickers and wrap it in whatever they want, with the white as a neutral base. You can often tell secretly white locomotives from the grab bars under the front windows; almost nobody bothers to paint or wrap those, generally speaking.
Design-wise… well, it's a box, with some slightly sculpted cabs at the end. A design feature that everybody loves are the "whiskers"; behind them is the cab air conditioner. People often compare it to European heavy semi-trucks, which is almost certainly intentional.
The full "default I don't care" Vectron doesn't have the silver edges and none of the big "230 km/h" and "Siemens" stickers of this one. It does have a dark grey frame, and a dark grey central roof section. These are the parts that get dirty the quickest (from the wheels and from the pantographs), so darker colours here help make that less apparent. Any part of a Vectron can and will become incredibly dirty eventually if you don't wash it, but these dark areas give you at least a couple more weeks before it becomes really apparent. They're not required, Siemens will happily paint any part of the locomotive any color you want, but a lot of companies adopt these colours for these parts anyway because it just makes sense.
The Beethoven locomotive up top is probably an example of a white default locomotive that got wrapped. I don't love the design, I think it's too busy, but it's not the worst.
For another example of a bad Vectron livery, I controversially submit BLS cargo, a Swiss railway company that nowadays does long-haul container traffic across Europe and crossing the alps:
First, see what I mean about getting dirty? Second, I know people like this livery, but to me, this is a pretty photograph on an otherwise boring livery. It's not integrated in the slightest, and the rest of the livery is just silver-grey, with some lime edges, and some red lower whiskers (fun fact: A splash of red at the front of the locomotive is legally required for Italy).
For something more interesting, let's consider their biggest competitor, SBB Cargo. SBB Cargo is a part of SBB, the Swiss state-owned railway company, and is the main provider of freight trains in Switzerland. They have an international arm, SBB Cargo International, which runs freight trains through Switzerland. Originally, SBB Cargo locomotives looked like this:
Red ends, blue middle, a big "cargo". For the classic locomotives, they got some dynamics slants in there. The more modern boring locomotives got red ends and red edges. In both cases, they're being a big cheeky with the dark frame: They're using it as a baseline for the "cargo" text, with the lower arch of the "g" extending into the frame. Also, note that the newer locomotive is number 482 000. Starting the numbering at zero? The Swiss sure are crazy.
They've been using this paint scheme for a while now, and it was good. But especially SBB Cargo International wanted something else, something of their own. They started out with some cheeky slogans, like the alp tamer:
Alpäzähmer roughly means "alp tamer" in deep Swiss dialect. The locomotive is advertising the opening of the Gotthard base tunnel under the alps in December of 2016, which finally "tamed" the mountain range.
Fun fact: In December of 2016 I travelled to Switzerland to experience this fresh new tunnel for myself. It is a massive engineering marvel, but it turns the actual experience of this 55 km/34 mile tunnel is just "dark for thirty minutes". On the way back, between Zurich and Munich, I watched some episodes of Supergirl, and somewhere around Lake Constance I wrote what is still somehow my most popular Tumblr post by a really long shot. I hate that post so much. The tunnel is good though.
However, a lot of SBB Cargo International's locomotives are just leased modern electrics with a logo stuck on there, like ES 64 F4-091.
Due to corporate mergers, this locomotive is currently on its third leasing company and 2.5th livery (most of it is still leasing company #2, leasing company #3 added the yellow stripe and replaced the logos of the old leasing company with their own). Since it was built in 2004, it's been hired by more than a dozen rail companies from Germany, the Netherlands, Italy, Switzerland, and Austria, it was very briefly a passenger locomotive despite only a 140 km/h (87 mph) top speed, and some companies, including SBB Cargo International, actually had it twice. And all it got to show for it is a logo, a name and an URL. Makes sense, who knows when it'll next get hired to Nordcargo, DB, ACTS, CTL, ITL, another branch of DB, TXL, KRE, RTB Cargo, NIAG LOCON, SETG…
But SBB Cargo International wanted to grow, and get locomotives that unquestionably their own; still leased, but on a very long-term basis, and with their own livery. Which locomotives? Siemens Vectron, of course, it's the default. Which livery? They could have just used a normal SBB Cargo livery, of course, but they wanted to stand out. Enter Simon Wijnacker.
Simon is a dutch rail nerd and graphics designer. He has written books about modern locomotives and their paint, he used to run a website cataloguing them, he still runs a news site about modern locomotives and their paint schemes, but most importantly, he and his design studio Railcolor Design… uh, design color schemes for rail vehicles.
And for SBB Cargo International, he (or his team) came up with a stand-out design: The Alppiercer.
Picture by Thomas Naas, licensed under CC-BY-ND 2.0, on Flickr
Everybody loves the Alppiercer, me included. The stepped gradient color palette? The clever use of the red ends and the blue center? The Swiss cross on the front? The ray of light under the mountains, symbolising how trains pierce the alps with the new Gotthard base tunnel? Perfection.
There have been dozens of variations of this design since, because SBB Cargo International now applies versions of it to all Vectrons it leases, no matter who from, so there are ones on black (Shadowpiercer, for locomotives from former MRCE), blue (Nighpiercer, for locomotives from Hupac), silver (Silverpiercer, Railpool), grey (Alppiercer 3, SüdLeasing), as well as all sorts of one-offs, like Hollandpiercer, Germanypiercer, Ruhrpiercer (for subsidiary RT&S) and so on.
In the meantime, the main SBB Cargo decided to get new locomotives as well, since maintenance of the old workhorses was getting more expensive than getting new ones. This is actually true for a lot of Europe, especially thanks to the need for new equipment like ETCS: Leasing a Vectron is often cheaper than keeping an old locomotive going, even though that one's already paid for. SBB Cargo (main) also decided to buy new locomotives; the contract for that went to Stadler, which surprised everyone. But until those new locomotives are designed, built and approved, it'll take a few years, so in the meantime they're doing the default thing and leasing a couple of Vectrons. They wanted them painted, though, and for that, they once again went to Simon, and he delivered. I don't know whether they requested something different from SBB Cargo International, or whether that was Simon's idea, but either way, this is the result:
I find this super-fascinating. It's the same locomotive, it's the same family of companies, it's based on the same blue-with-red-ends original design, it's even the same designer, yet it's a completely different feel. Don't even focus on that the alp motive is gone and the big "cargo" is back, look at the details:
In the Alppiercer, the red at the front goes all the way down to the bottom of the frame. Here, the frame is dark grey throughout.
The Alppiercer added some black over and under the front windows, where the handrails are. The domestic version lowers is until the black almost hits the whiskers.
Both actually visually raise the frame a bit, by painting the lowest section of the main body in the same color as the frame, but the big cargo version raises it higher, and draws your eye with a big white line. It's also just more frame, because the red of the Alppiercer turns back, creating an arrow shape, while the other has the red just plain slanted, thus giving more red.
There's even a bit of extra frame grey on the lowest set of whiskers.
Both locomotives feature black frames around the door side windows; fairly angular for the Alppiercer, but very smooth for the big cargo version. The big cargo version also links these frames with a horizontal line at the top of the body.
So both locomotives are red at the front, but the impression is a very different one. The Alppiercer looks taller, the big cargo version looks longer and more business-like, stronger.
(Also interesting: The lower arch of the g of the cargo can no longer be on the actual frame, because the Vectron has a very busy frame, with cutouts for fuel tanks in case you want to install a small diesel, with lots and lots of labels, and of course crucially, both a big "Siemens" and a big "Vectron" logo somewhere in there.)
But also interesting are the choices that are the same. A black frame around all windows emphasises them and makes them look larger. The locomotive has some defined bevels, but Railcolor largely ignores them - compare how much red the Alppiercer has with how much lime green the BLS version has. There is a very strong sense here that "I decide what the visual shape of the locomotive is, the manufacturer's outer shape is just a suggestion".
This becomes especially clear when you see the Alppiercer design applied on one of the earlier modern electrics, the Traxxpiercer:
Picture by peters452002, licensed under CC-BY-NC-SA, via Flickr
This is apparently going to stay a one-off, but it makes for an interesting comparison with a locomotive of the same type with the original paint scheme.
Oh god these things have gotten dirty and washed out. Pretty soon the ends will just be white if this continues. But anyway, note that the repainted one again got a raised frame, black around the side windows, extended black around (especially above) the front windows, and extended red at the edges. A subtle touch is that near the buffers, the red is cut off with a bit of black, making the shape slightly more fluid and dynamic. Yes, admittedly the main reason why it looks better and more modern is because it's clean, but also, Railcolor reinvented what it means to make the ends of a TRAXX locomotive red, which is not something anyone else ever tried.
The raised frame is a staple of Railcolor Design, seen also e.g. on their work for Flex, Budamar, very strongly for RTB Cargo and most hilariously Raillogix. The latter (sadly I didn't find any Creative Commons licensed pictures of it) is particularly hilarious, because there's so little design: The most boring logo ever, the company name, one color, a slightly different one for one corner each, and that's it… but then there's a bit of black around the front windows, and a bit of a raised locomotive frame, just as a little "Simon was here".
The Flex one also shows another staple of Railcolor Design, the "dog bone" design (name by me, not official): A narrow beam in the middle that expands out at the cabs. The "Transformer" locomotive for Trustrail is another good example; part of the designs for EBS that Railcolor keeps making that all follow this general approach.
Meanwhile the stepped gradient palettes are also popular. Adria Transport 193 012 "From Sea to Summit" is clearly not an Alppiercer, but very obviously designed by the same people.
So… what can we say from a critical artistic perspective about the work of Railcolor Design when it comes to inventing new ways to paint Swiss locomotives red and blue? I dunno, honestly, I have zero art education. I do know they're putting a lot of care and work into it; they're not afraid to redefine the visual shape of the locomotive; they're playing with its appearance, tall or long or shark-like…
Picture by Rob Dammers, licensed under CC-BY 2.0, found on Flickr
I haven't yet seen a really wide Vectron. Anyway, a lot of interesting stuff coming out from them that, in my opinion, pushes what train design can be in interesting directions.
What do you think? Especially if you know more about art and graphic design than me?
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