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Brighton Belle? Royal Scot? Why its time to restart naming British trains
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Brighton Belle? Royal Scot? Why its time to restart naming British trains

The Independent·Simon Calder·20 days ago
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A top rail tip for you: I am sitting in first class aboard the 9.58am train from Brighton to London with only a standard ticket. But I am not trying my luck and hoping to evade revenue protection staff. The rear first-class carriage on Thameslink trains is always “declassified” to make more seats available for those of us with cheaper tickets. Yet how I yearn for the era of the Brighton Belle . This was a premium first- and third-class only train, launched in 1933, that shuttled non-stop between London Victoria and Brighton in an hour. Today’s everyday successors, which pause twice along the way, are only a couple of minutes quicker on the 51-mile run. “It was a common practice among railway companies to assign distinctive names to their train services,” notes Jeff Dickinson of Clitheroe in the Today’s Railways magazine. He cites the Royal Scot , a prestigious express between London Euston and Glasgow Central. Naming trains has always been a marketing tool to promote particularly fast or long services.…

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