How do trains get their names

Returning to the roots of London Chimes that of stories and facts of interest surround the railway industry past and present, the following bulletin has been found and is reproduced here without permission from the author, who by the way did a great job.

The late poet and railway enthusiast Sir John Betjeman is having a train named after him. But how do trains normally get names?

What have Michael Palin, Dr Who, Lady Penelope and Brookside got in common? They've all had trains named in their honour.

And now the late poet Sir John Betjeman, the laureate of the melancholy railway ride, has had a train named after him - with a ceremony held on Friday at London's Liverpool Street Station.

The poet caught the romance of train travel in the English countryside and the sprawling suburbs - and the train named after him will operate on the route between London and Norwich, a trip reflected in the poem A Mind's Journey to Diss.

But how do trains - and more precisely, locomotives that pull trains - get names? Every time you go through a mainline station, you see these nameplates - but who decides what they should be called?

The tradition of naming trains is as old as the railways - back to the 1820s and George Stephenson's Rocket. This followed in the convention of naming ships - and gave an extra sense of character to the technology. Catching the Flying Scotsman sounds more of an event than the 11.37 from King's Cross.

Before the railways were nationalised as British Rail, companies such as Southern, Great Western and LNER had their own themes, such as naming trains after racehorses, schools, Arthurian characters or famous castles.
Then, as now, names were decided upon informally by the individual companies, without any official process. And there have been all kinds of weird, wonderful and even downright dull selections.

Dr Who appears on the nameplate of one of Virgin's Voyager trains - along with other explorers including Christopher Columbus, Marco Polo, Yuri Gagarin, Sir Walter Raleigh and that other great historical figure, Michael Palin.

Does it make a difference? If you were travelling on the Captain Robert Scott or Sir Ernest Shackleton would you be less inclined to feel the cold?

"It adds a little romance and gives something extra - or maybe gives a flavour of an area," says Virgin spokesperson, Lee West. For instance, in Cornwall, Virgin's train has a Cornish name - Vyajer Kernewek.

The naming theme was taken even further with Virgin's rescue locos - which retrieve broken-down trains. These have been named after Thunderbirds characters - Lady Penelope, Tracy Island, Brains, Fab 1, Parker and so on.

The company that makes many of the modern nameplates is Newton Replicas in Nottingham.
This specialist firm made the Thunderbird nameplates - all in blue except pink for Lady Penelope - and has produced the plate for the newly-launched Sir John Betjeman for railway company, One.

Chris Donovan, who runs the company, has been commissioned for all kinds of nameplates, from the poignant to the ponderous.

He remembers making a plate called Sophie, in memory of a girl who had been killed on the railways. Another train was named after a driver who had died in a collision.

As well as enjoying evocative names such as Tintagel, he recalls a freight company naming its trains after the women working in its office.

And there have been outsized names for trains which have been so long that they're "more like essays". These have included the snappily-titled London Borough of Havering Celebrating 40 Years and the even more extended London Borough of Newham Host Borough 2012 Olympic Bid.

There is one name that should be there, but for which so far he's never received a commission: Thomas the Tank Engine.