This VE Day stamp lacks attention to detail over train livery

I AM sure that many people are very impressed by the new set of Royal Mail stamps depicting VE Day in 1945.

The photographs were originally black and white, and the colourist has made a good job of tinting them in various 
colours to bring them alive to us in 2020.

Only one small quibble, though. One of the stamps depicts evacuee children arriving back on a train. The station is clearly recognisable as St Pancras. So why has he coloured the carriages in green? Green has always been the colour of the old Southern Railway which operates out of Charing Cross and Waterloo etc.

The carriages, of course, should have been the deep maroon of the London, Midland and Scottish Railway. Apart from that, a good effort!

But detail does matter. The biggest recent clanger has to be in the film Dunkirk. Suddenly seeing a group of exhausted Tommies slumped in a blue upholstered 1970s British Rail carriage did not do a lot for the authenticity of this otherwise excellent film.

Anyone with a smattering of historical knowledge knows generally what a 1940s railway carriage was like: compartments, wood panelling, leather strap on the door and carriage prints.

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James Mitchinson

Editor