InterCity Class 47s With Virgin Trains

"Most of Virgin's loco-hauled XC runs operated between the North West and the South West, or the North West and the South East."

One of the reasons why so few photographers can assemble quality pictorials recalling the InterCity Class 47/8s in the Virgin CrossCountry era, is simply that in the initial phase of Virgin Trains, IC 47/8s were considered a "waste of a photo". They were the default. And until spring 2000, still responsible for the majority of diesel loco-haulage across the Virgin network. As a facet of the scene that most people had already photographed in the latter days of British Rail, the IC 47/8s were roundly ignored.

But by the late 1990s, regretting missed opportunities to record the mundane as a teenager a decade and a half earlier, I suppose I made the InterCity 47/8s my opportunity to atone for the future. Now that future is upon us. It's time to look back on what was, in its day, a sphere of mundanity, but which now stands as a lesser-documented component of an ebbing era. The era of widespread locomotive passenger haulage.

The History of InterCity Livery on CrossCountry Trains

"...But the trains that really kickstarted the InterCity era in earnest were the HSTs. After that, BR never looked back."

As was made abundantly clear in Virgin Trains’ famous heritage repaint programme, InterCity livery was a monumental landmark in the history of British Rail’s passenger operations. It ranked alongside two-tone green, corporate blue and large logo as one of the big four nationwide aesthetics adopted by premium passenger diesels. And even though it still hadn’t disappeared from CrossCountry by the year of the repaint programme (2001), InterCity was deemed a classic heritage livery and included in the retro repaint selection alongside the other greats.

In this post we’ll take an illustrated look at the two-decade-long history of InterCity livery, as it appeared on the CrossCountry network. Let’s start at the beginning…