FINAL ENTRY
InterCity Swallow
Link.
As a user with a keen interest in railways and railway livery designs, I've always thought that out of all the vehicles in GT Sport, the Samba is the closest to resembling a train. One of my favourite liveries of any railway operator is British Rail's InterCity ‘Swallow’ livery from the late-1980s, which I first fondly remember seeing on 125 (High Speed Train) and 225 (Class 91 + Mark 4 carriage) sets when I was very young. Sometime last week, I began work on a replica of this livery using
this decal from Discover, as I felt it would look especially nice on something as boxy and utilitarian as the Samba.
My intention at first was to make the livery in the style of a Class 91 locomotive, with full-width headlight surrounds, larger white sections on the roof and front doors as well as a lighter grey rear section also applied to carriages (photo below was taken by myself).
However, when I struggled to get the 'bonnet' decal layers to look right, I eventually chose to simplify the design with a black roof/window surrounds and stripes extending to the doors, while also taking out the grey section at the rear. This variant of 'Swallow' livery was applied to various other diesel and electric locomotives used by the InterCity sector; my main influence for the revision being the
Class 86/87 variant with white lower bodies.
To create the illusion of having multiple 'InterCity' logos, duplicates of the above decal were placed along the bodysides, with different parts covered up by default shapes where needed. For added realism, extra roof decals representing an orange cantrail stripe and a custom SVG running number were added (I am aware that
there was a real-life Class 46, but would like to stress that the number is strictly fictitious). While the front end still needed a lot of work to get it to look right, I think the end result is satisfactory enough considering how fickle the Samba is to work on.
