What decided the Skytrain line colours?

This post has been sitting with me for a long while: why do the three SkyTrain lines have the colours they have today?

If we look at the Millennium Line, it’s coloured as yellow; the Expo Line is coloured as blue, and the Canada Line is light blue. The latter is weird I must admit, but it might help to explain the history of colouring on SkyTrain maps.

This is the original SkyTrain map. No mention of an Expo Line because it was all that existed when it opened for Expo 86, the World’s Fair hosted here in Vancouver. It was a simple line which ran from Waterfront to New Westminster. The line was coloured in red and that is curious because it was pretty standard for BC Transit and its predecessor BC Hydro née BC Electric Railway.

In this 1930s map, all of the street cars and interurbans were given a red line. It might seem confusing to look at, but being that the transit network went to where people lived and people lived near the street cars and interurbans, it was fairly simple.

Eventually when maps needed to provide information about fares being charged by zone, the red colour went away in favour of black and stuck for nearly two decades.

TransLink inherited the colour scheme from BC Transit and continued to mark bus routes as red. With the opening of the Millennium Line and subsequent naming of the original SkyTrain line becoming “Expo” in honour of its origins, colours were needed to differentiate their service separate from buses.

So why yellow and blue?

Blue should be an easy colour to talk about. SkyTrain was opened in time for Expo 86.

If we look at the Expo logo itself, we see a blue and this was the primary colour for the fair itself. With blue being the colour of Expo and being one of the primary colours used for the original SkyTrain livery, it stands to reason the best choice was a dark blue.

So Expo was easy, but then why is the Millennium Line given a yellow colour? The naming is straightforward, it was opened in time to mark the new millennium, but the colour is strange.

It would be safe to assume one thing: look at the political parties in power.

The political party in provincial power at the time of SkyTrain’s inauguration was Social Credit (Socred). Their primary colours were blue and red and they were not too dissimilar from BC Transit’s livery and in turn SkyTrain’s.

In the 1990s, the NDP colours were not orange as we know them now but instead blue, yellow, and red. The Millennium Line was an NDP project and it is safe to assume that the colour chosen was purely to have one that wasn’t that of the Socreds.

This is the best explanation I have because we see it play out when we talk about the Canada Line, because then things get weird. The Canada Line has a light blue colour, right? Let’s talk about some logos here.

If we look at the SkyTrain logo adopted by TransLink when the Millennium Line opened, we see two colours atop of the “SkyTrain” text itself: blue and yellow. This logo was made to indicate the two lines of the then current SkyTrain system. So let’s see the logo used for the Canada Line when it was under construction.

Like the SkyTrain logo, we see two familiar lines, but then we see a red line added with a maple leaf at the tail just above “Canada Line”. It is safe to assume that during planning and construction that the Canada Line itself was going to have a red colour. So why the change?

The prevailing thought was that red was initially chosen as it was a colour of the BC Liberals. However, red is also the primary colour of the federal Liberal party. As provincial politics in British Columbia are weird and the BC Liberals (now BC United) were not at all associated with the federal party other than by name (unlike the NDP), it has been suggested that pressure from the Conservative Party likely led to the colour not being adopted in order to secure funding.

Whether or not this is the case is hard to say, but there has been another instance where a colour was chosen for a rapid transit project for purely political reasons.

The extension of the Millennium Line into Coquitlam in 2016 was originally slated to be its own individual light rail line. It’s a recurring theme to have light rail become SkyTrain in Metro Vancouver and the “Evergreen Line” was eventually replaced by the “Evergreen extension” for a brief period of time after it was established it would integrated into the existing network.

For a few years, the Millennium Line had a separate indicator for its Tri-cities extension only because the mayors of the time wanted it.

Though he said he understands TransLink’s intent to keep the name consistent with the Millennium Line, he said that name for that line has never made sense.

The mayor suggested SkyTrain lines could be renamed for their actual destinations.

“We still think it’s a problem that needs a better solution than what TransLink initially proposed,” he said, adding the city suggested Evergreen-Millennium, but that was turned down because it was too long.

“They’ve got some work to do clearly, they’ve [TransLink] gone down the path to having it renamed the Millennium Line without telling anybody.”

Port Moody Mayor Mike Clay is equally unimpressed with the idea of a name change for the new line.

“You just don’t give up on your brand,” he said.

“People buy into a brand, people identify with it locally. So the Evergreen Line is our line in the Tri-Cities, it’s always been that way. We’ve always identified with it.”

Seven years later and nobody refers to it as “Evergreen”-anything.

The current SkyTrain map shows a standard yellow colour and makes no mention of the special name given. The branding does remain in the stations themselves, but if the network is ever extended into Port Coquitlam, it is difficult to say whether or not it would keep it all. It should be kept in mind that these same demands never came from Vancouver for its extension to Arbutus or from Surrey or Langley for the extension out into the valley.

There is one more colour to talk about before I close this off: pink.

When SkyTrain has maintenance or must run a special service when dealing with station upgrades, the colour pink has been reserved to indicate that it is temporary.

So there you have it: the colours chosen to represent the lines on the map are either purely political or something is disrupted.

This was originally posted to cohost.org/VancouverTransit.