I had so much fun thinking about rail liveries last time, where we compared SBB Cargo and SBB Cargo International, so let's do this again. This time, just looking at the new livery of Austrian company CargoServ. And here it is on a Siemens Vectron:
Source: CargoServ press release. All pictures in this post are from there or the press section of the CargoServ website. I think this blog basically qualifies as press, right?
But to analyse that, we need to first look at some history. CargoServ is part of the Voestalpine group, a major steel manufacturer from Austria. Founded in 2001, it was part of the first wave of companies taking advantage of European rail liberalisation to run their own trains on the Austrian and neighbouring networks. I think they've taken on some outside clients, but their main job is still hauling ore and steel to and from the steel works.
They started with a predecessor of the Vectron, the Siemens ES64U2 and ES64U4, also known as "Taurus" although legally only ones owned by Austrian state railway ÖBB are officially called that (ÖBB holds the trademark).
This is the livery which with they started, and which they kept until now. They've applied it to some of their Vectrons as well.
The livery is… fine. The asymmetry is fun. From one end the locomotive appears very yellow, but mostly grey from the other. For the Vectron, they broke up the blue stripe on the front and instead painted the "whiskers" blue. Some black above and below the front windows
But the shapes, the white lines highlighting everything, the choice of bold blue and faded yellow, it all feels a bit 2001, doesn't it? Like, that's the box your first DVD player came in.
Now let's look at the new livery again.
We keep the colors, but not much more than that. This is clearly the work of Railcolor Design, a dutch agency that I also talked a lot about in the last post. Lots of little hints show this, like the fact that I learned about this redesign on the railway news website they operate.
Let's go bottom to top. The frame is in the standard dark grey with light hints of brown that Siemens uses by default if you don't tell them otherwise. As mentioned previously, Siemens actually builds a lot of locomotives with factory default paint, generally for leasing companies that then pass the locomotives to customers who apply their own paint with stickers. This new locomotive is one of them, visible by the fact that the grab rails are white instead of matching any of the colors on the body, and by the fact that the logo of leasing company ELL is on the side.
In the old design, the frame looks pretty much the same, and not by accident: This is the part of the locomotive that gets dirty first, and this color is good at hiding it. But then the body starts with a bold white line with a blue line on top, providing a clear separation of the halves. Railcolor went ahead and purposefully made that distinction less clear. The white-blue separator still exists, but it's now higher, with more of the grey brown below, giving the locomotive a visually larger frame. And then they cheekily pull up the white line in the middle, to put the CargoServ logo on frame brown even though it's fully on the body. This is a design for a locomotive that can and will get dirty while doing heavy haulage. Presumably it's meant to make the locomotive seem more powerful.
In front, we have a completely different approach to the whiskers: Blue, White, then two grey-brown ones. The locomotive appears vertically squished; a workhorse with a heavy frame implying power, not a tall regal presence.
Above, we get the same yellow. It's the corporate design, it is what it is. On the sides there is some cheekiness with the blue and white stripes getting wider where they warp around the logo, and the blue one appearing to get hidden behind the logo.
We still have the black window masks in the front, now extended a few centimetres more downward, again, squishing all the bright color between the darkness.
On the sides, we get semi-swoopy window frames, and incredibly long ones. They really do not want to have large areas of yellow standing alone here. The light grey of the old design is completely gone. What's interesting is the top line of the window frames, which actually sits below the actual window. A mistake? Highly unlikely. No, it supports the way every other design choice also vertically squishes the locomotive, giving it more frame and less body and thus making it seem more like a powerhouse for heavy stuff.
The different perspectives and the platform in front twist perspectives, but even so it's clear that when you compare the old and new Vectrons, the new one appears almost hunched down, deliberately a freight locomotive.
The overall design has kept some asymmetry, with the logo offset to one side and longer window frames on the other, which still gives notably different impressions when seen from different angles, but it's less extreme than before.
And here's where we close the circle to the original post, because this design is, in a lot of ways, incredibly reminiscent of another Railcolor design for Vectrons: That for domestic SBB Cargo.
Source: Me
It's a very different color scheme, nobody is going to confuse these locomotives for one another anytime soon. But the design approach is fundamentally the same: Same idea, very similar details. We get a similar kind of raised frame. The window frames are a more reasonable size and position, but a similar slanted and rounded shape. The front mask goes deep down, together with other darker elements, here the bar connecting the window frames.
Railcolor likes to play with the shape of the locomotive, making it appear sometimes taller and sometimes much more long than it really is. The diagonals with rounding are very common elements as well. This is absolutely a recognisable house style. One that I like, actually, but it also makes me wonder what other designers could do with similar briefs.
