>>1213582>Why the fuck did they get rid of it? The silver paint scheme they've used since then is SO dull.SNCF is completely retarded when it comes to paint scheme management for starters.
To make it worse, the three designers responsible for the successive iterations of the TGV interiors and liveries absolutely despise each other and part of their job consisted in undoing as much as what had been done before.
And since I got nothing better to do let's get started with the man, the legend, Jacques Cooper. In the late 60s, Jacques Cooper is in his late 30s and is having a decent industrial design career (from fridges to sportscars). At some point, he is approached by Alsthom and asked to "design a train which doesn't look like a train".
So he did what any other man would have done: he designed a square-ish airliner nose and slapped a pair of sporty headlights on it... and he painted it bright orange because why the fuck would you not? It's the 70s and orange is a kickass color.
Once cleaned up for industrialisation and redesigned as an EMU because lol-oilcrisis, that's pretty much what the first gen TGVs ended up looking like.
That orange ended up being the staple of SNCF main lines service for a while. Coach doors were orange, locomotives had an orange stripe along the body, even suburbans trains had orange fake leather seats.
Eventually, the man fell out of favors and got the boot from Alsthom in 1987. Most of the French main line rolling stock at that time had some orange paint somewhere, lost amidst light and dark grey.
(cont.)
