Friends of the Rail Forum

Rift Valley Railways has repainted some coaches from the Kenya Railways chocloate and cream (reminiscent of the GWR) to green and white. They look clean and bright, but somehow the old colours seem more dignified.

Photos by John Ashworth, Nairobi, 29th August 2009

White is never a good color for things like this. They become dirty instantly. Except, of course, for Land Rovers in the tropics; white is the coolest color and they are supposed to get dirty. When it came time for house painting, my boss in Malawi always insisted on the color 'mud and dust'.

The environnmentalists are all advocating that house and building roofs be painted white to held alleviate global warming (or something like that), I suspect dirty roofs will be the result, but in the tropics it may end up being a sensible thing to do. I do however think there is a certain logic in not painting stuff like trains white, and the same goes for harbour cranes.

Always been under the impression that dark collours show dirt quicker than white, and that dark collured cars have to be washed more frequently?

More and more coaches are being repainted into RVR colours

Is it possible to get these in higher resolution?

When I compress my photos for posting I tend to delete the high resolution original, as I'm not really a serious photographer. I'll have a look on my computer at home tonight and see if I still have any of these in original high resolution form.

Derek Walker wrote:The environnmentalists are all advocating that house and building roofs be painted white to held alleviate global warming (or something like that), I suspect dirty roofs will be the result, but in the tropics it may end up being a sensible thing to do. I do however think there is a certain logic in not painting stuff like trains white, and the same goes for harbour cranes.

Have you seen my report here?
Trains at the railway line where I live next to ?
There you can see white trains of the Deutsche Bahn - the one with the red locos (I don't like the coaches in that color) and a grey railcar of the NOB. And you're right, the trains look really dirty after a short while.

But I like the colors of this coaches shown here, because they are not only white.

Craig - we cannot unfortunately do higher resolution pics on the Forum - or we would be unable to post the pics we do! Space etc.!

But if you are interesting in something and ask the potographers for originals, I am sure they will oblige!

And another one. One of the painters told me that the colours might have to change again as a result of the changes in RVR shareholders, but I haven't heard that anywhere officially.