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East Midlands Inter City Kitty

Railfuture East Midlands Branch made a call for improvements on the North Staffordshire Line between Derby and Crewe via Stoke-on-Trent its key campaign for 2018.

To assist us, we commissioned some artwork from illustrator Laura Buckland to depict the single-coach railcar which provided the usual service on this line at that time as The Inter-City Kitty with the question: Shouldn't it be a lion? We launched this artwork at a reception at the Derby Roundhouse in October 2018, with a gathering of representatives from the rail industry and fellow stakeholders.

On 23 October 2018 the Railfuture East Midlands branch publicly launched its campaign for an improved Derby-Crewe service. This is the graphic they used to promote it

We believed that the potential of this under-utilised Midlands link for both enhanced local services and strategic longer-distance services was so great, that there was a risk in any campaigning of generating confusion with regard to exactly what improvements should be provided, for whom and in what order. We believed that a humorous image could serve to unite the various interests and inspire constructive dialogue with regard to the way forward.

The campaign brought an initial rapid result: two-coach railcars were assigned to the service from December 2019. However, we consider this to be merely a start, and will continue to call for improvements to both rolling stock and infrastructure until we consider the North Staffordshire Line to be playing its optimal role in our national railway network.

We are continuing to make the Inter-City Kitty image available free online in the hope that it may continue to be of use in campaigning, both for further improvements on the North Staffordshire Line and imaginatively for other rail campaigning.

Please select the format(s) appropriate to your intended use:

Colour PNG image for web use
Black-and-white PNG image for web use
Colour TIFF image for printing
Black-and-white TIFF image for printing

Any queries, please use the contact details given for East Midlands Branch.

Image
The single-coach railcar service at Derby. Photo by Ariadne Tampion for Railfuture.



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