1970s British Rail ad: Inter-City makes the going easy

1970s business travel ad from British Rail, featuring a Deltic on the East Coast Main Line.

Note politically incorrect use of the lady's thighs but her face is not shown. The pipe-smoking gentleman on a train is also an image that we see no more.

Taken from a VHS compilation produced for the last InterCity hospitality event, March 1994.

Some years ago, a BR employee named Frank Dumbleton rescued some VHS tapes *literally* from a British Rail skip in York. These included many TV and Cinema ads from the 70s and 80s. He digitised them and has given permission for them to be reproduced, here.

British Rail started to advertise on television after it had established the Inter-City revolution in the 1960s. Most of the commercials were aimed at enticing people out of their cars, or dissuading them from choosing internal air travel.

Whilst we can look back at these ads with joy, we shouldn’t have rosy spectacles on. A nationalised rail/operator system was far from perfect: reality was not as these ads portray. They are adverts, not documentaries. Now, British railways carry twice the passengers as they did back then, and are in a far better state.

A copy of this ad also now resides with the National Railway Museum archive in York.

[deldirk]

On an earlier comment was a question was Keith Barron the commentator in this ad. I think it is. I've just watched Keith Barron playing a violent escaped prisoner in 'z Cars'. The name of the episode is 'The Prisoner'. Versatile actor

[GEdgemaster]

Eeesh, that cameraman was close to the train at the end!

[fatwalletboy]

Is that the late Keith Barron narrating?

[MQsCues]

You can call it politically incorrect or you could call it mysogynistic, sexist, objectifying, ...