Colours on the underground map

The Met is maroon because the Metropolitan Railway used a maroon colour scheme, similarly I think the DR was green.

I believe that red and black were chosen for the Central and Northern because they contrast nicely and form a strong centre to the map at Tottenham Court Road. Why this way round I don't know - did the CLR have red scheme?

The Jubilee Line is silver because it is named for Lizzie's silver jubilee.

Overground is Orange presumably because the East London Line was orange (although they are different oranges, for reasons I've never understood). My guess as to why the ELL was orange and the H&C is pink is that these were available colours when they were split from the Met.

The DLR colour is the same as the colour on their old logo, but I couldn't say which came first.

I don't know of any significance to the Circle, Picc, Vic or Bakerloo's colours - although this doesn't mean there aren't any.

Sorry, I must disagree with the whole maroon thing; the Metropolitan line is corporate magenta.

static.scribd.com/docs/6wfl4g62vle8w.swf?INITIAL_VIEW=width

And I think the circle line is yellow because it needn't stand out as much as a line such as the Northern as it is merged with others. I think this could of been mentioned on mapman?

(Sorry - another long post, I'm not very good at being concise!)


I think the reason why the Overground has a different orange goes way back. On the original London Connections map, produced jointly by LT and British Rail in the early 80's (before even Network SouthEast had come into existence) the Underground lines were represented by their respective colours, whilst the BR lines were shown in orange (I think they were shown in a 'striped' orange, much like the DLR is shown with a striped line today). If I recall correctly the one exception to this was Thameslink, which started in 1988 and was always shown as a blue line.

Much later, though I'm not sure exactly when, the London Connections map started showing all the rail lines in different colours (I think this was intended to make it clearer which - or 'group of lines' - each of the different lines belonged to, but I'm a bit hazy on this). I think that at the same time, as all the BR lines received a colour, the Underground lines on the London Connections map were relegated to being represented by their black-and-white patterns instead!

This lasted for several years, and it was only around 2000 or so when the Underground lines began to be shown in colour again on the London Connections map - they were shown as thin coloured lines, to contrast them from the thick coloured lines used to represent mainline rail lines.


Incidentally for a while in the mid to late 80's on the Underground's own map they also used the same orange (either solid or striped) to represent the few British Rail lines which were included on the map, for example the GN&CR line between Moorgate and Finsbury Park. (Though they didn't show Thameslink as blue, which I think is how it always appeared on the London Connections map!)

Have a look at some of these old Underground maps on this "London Tube Map Archive" website:
www.clarksbury.com/cdl/maps.html


Confused... you will be. Or more likely you already are - I certainly am


Anyway I think this orange - which used to be used to show British Rail lines on both the London Connections map and the Underground map - has been resurrected to be the line colour for London Overground (and indeed the colour for all their signs and finishings and eventually it'll appear on their trains).

The use of this orange for LO also fits in nicely with some other things...

• The Silverlink Metro routes used to appear on the London Connections map in this orange colour (and LO hasn't of course changed this)
  
• The orange colour hadn't yet been used by any of the other TfL divisions (or 'modes') in their respective roundels - i.e. buses have a red roundel, trams have a green roundel, streets have a grey roundel etc, so now LO has an orange roundel.
  
• And of course London Overground will eventually to take over the East London Line - even if LO uses a slightly different orange, it's still orange so when it eventually appears on the map when the ELL extension opens it will be similar enough for people to realise the connection between the new extended route and the old ELL.
  

To me, the Central Line's color always looked more of a burnt orange rather than red (I even thought this was the case when I was a lad living in the Capital).

Ruislip agreed! I always used to think of it as a deep orange.

Regarding DLR, just been looking on LU map archives, and I can confirm the DLR was shown as blue until the 1994 map, in which it became teal.

Are you regarding the teal oblong with "DOCKLANDS LIGHT RAIL" written in it? They are still in use on quite few signs at Canary Wharf too!

No, not that one, I'm assuming it was the very first DLR logo. Dark blue oblong with "Docklands" written on it, there might have been a red stripe along the bottom too.

Edit - It looked like where it says "Telephone" here, except it said "Docklands".

It's Battleship Grey.