How to choose liveries

Yet again, the subject of alleged poor sales of Dapol's class 73 has erupted on the Ngauge Mailing List. While the usual suspects are claiming that the 73 was a silly prototype to have done in the first place, the more likely culprit is Dapol's strange choice of liveries. They started off with two obscure and short-lived liveries (EWS and Southwest Trains), and appeared to have deliberately held back the most popular liveries until last. Then, after flooding the market with too many liveries in too short a time, they complain that the final livery (BR Blue) is selling poorly.

I think it's a myth that a model locomotive needs a huge number of possible liveries in order to sell, to the extend that some numerous and long-lived prototypes have been suggested as poor choices as RtR models because they carried 'too few liveries'.

The trouble is that if a prototype carried 20 liveries, it probably means that 15 of those 20 liveries will only appeal to a limited subset of modellers. Dapol's EWS and SWT class 73s gather dust on dealer's shelves, while kettles (which come in just green or black) sell like hot cakes.

I believe manufacturers should think long and hard at what liveries they should be producing models, and should go for those which are likely to sell well as their initial liveries, not hold them back for later. There are exceptions, of course; there have been one or two particularly attractive liveries that have sold regardless of the fact that only one loco ever carried them. The Pullman livery 73 is a case in point.

For a hypothetical example, look at the class 47. Over their 40 year careers, they've carried a bewildering variety of liveries. But a significant proportion of those liveries were short-lived, often applied to just a handful of locomotives. Many were one-off depot specials. I don't believe any sensible manufacturer should focus on these limited appeal liveries at the expense of bread-and-butter colour schemes.

If I was a manufacturer making an all-new Class 47, the first six liveries should be something like BR Blue, Two Tone Green, Virgin, RES, Railfreight Speedlink, InterCity Swallow.

All of them were applied to significant numbers of locos, and (with the exception of Virgin) lasted quite a long time, and covered a wide geographical area. I know there are some significant liveries missing from the list; large logo blue comes to mind. But between them those six liveries cover just about every base - anyone modelling any part of the country from 1962 to 2002 will find a use for at least one of those six. Lesser region-specific or shorter-lived liveries like GW150, NSE, Scotrail, Dutch or EWS can wait. And things like 47803's "Yellow Peril" or the Police Car livery should be left to the respray artists.

For the humble class 08 shunter, a prototype that's carried even more colour schemes, it's even simpler; Banger Blue, BR Green and EWS will probably satisfy the 08 needs for 95% of the market. After all, there are still BR blue 08s running today!