BR Western Region signal box colour query.

We're currently re-painting Llangollen Station signal box into 1950s chocolate & cream colours. We have a difference of opinion over what colour the metal window handrails should be. I think that they should be black, but our Heritage people think that chocolate would be the correct colour. Do we have somebody independent to rule on this please ?

Bob.

 

Don't know if this is any help https://www.stationcolours.com/gwr The authors refer to Llan and Bodmin as the best examples. The signal box at Bodmin appears to have black handrails.
Cheers,
Ray.

 

Lostwithiel box appears to have black handrails in this photo.
Ray.

 

All ironwork ie hand rails, gutters and downpipes - black

 

Bronwydd Arms SB has always had black handrails since painted from GW colours in about 1991. We also restored the top half of Ffairfach SB with black handrails.

Regards

Matt

 

The Great Western certainly painted the handrails, or guardrails as they called them, black but a chap I consulted who's into GWR signalling thinks that BR WR may have painted them chocolate.

We painted the Broadway SB ones black.

 

Thanks for the answers everybody. They are going to be black then !

Bob.

 

But what shade????

 

Your doing it Bob, so your choice

Looks much better already anyway.

 

Why don't you just strip back the old paint to see what colour was used?

 

I bet some painter finishing the job used chocolate either because:
he had no black paint handy,
to save cleaning another brush,
quicker not to risk getting black on the chocolate before the chocolate had dried,
because he or the signal man fancied it
or simply, with lampblack as the pigment, black paint is on the slow side drying.

I could see somebody out to achieve a - small - cost saving might suppress painting the window rails different
but I would not infer from a sprinkling of photographs that it was more than occasional to leave them chocolate.

 

I doubt that Llangollen Signal box and station were actually painted chocolate and cream in the 1950s in the Carmine & Cream ere although it may have been done later in the 1960s. The front cover of "The Llangollan Line Rueben To Barmouth" by W.G. Rear & N. Jones published by Foxline shows an excellent colour photo of the box and station taken from the bridge taken in 1953 and appears to show all the buildings in a what looks like a recent coat of Venetian Red and cream, in which case to answer your question I would have thought the window handrails probably would have been painted black. I have seen colour photos of various ex GWR station signs painted Venetian Red instead of Chocolate Brown which bears this out.