Some sister companies of broadcasters

There were also Rediffusion rental shops, complete with the famous Adastral logo. Our local one became Granada in the early 80s. I'm guessing Granada took them over.

Of course Associated Rediffusion's parent company, BET, owned many other businesses, many of which continued to use the Adastral up until the mid 90s.

Yes, they did, Southern Electric's predated Meridian by 5 or 6 years

More about the Rediffusion TV shops, and their cable tv system, here. http://www.rediffusion.org/

Only three years actually, it dates from 1990.

Oooh, I'm sure I was getting bills from about 1988 with the logo

I am fairly certain that ‘Westward’ were the ‘West’ in ‘Pro-West’, manufactures of tv equipment that went on to become Pro-bel. Used to work on one of their vision mixers, not a bad bit of kit for the era.

They also used to own a publishing company - Hutchinson. Also a tv equipment firm called DTL, they used to produce a very well respected lighting control system called Datalite, also a range of video and audio distribution amplifiers.

Central Trains was owned by the National Express Group.
So, unless there was some very distant shareholding via the largest operator of buses in the West Midlands area - at the time branded - Travel West Midlands (which was employee owned, until NEG brought it) and the shareholding tenticles wind back to a minor holding in Central Independent Television - then the same Central tv/Central Trains typeface, was probably not 100% co-incidental.

I don't really see the similarity of the logo except them both being based on the letter C. It's less coincidence, more unoriginal logo design

NatEx were sh*t at trains. Every franchise they ran was either taken off them for incompetence or they gave it up. Now they run bitter anti-train adverts bemoaning engineering works despite their total coach capacity, frequency and comfort being vastly inferior to even the worst train travel.

[quote="bluecortina" pid="1090039"]

Yes, a joint venture with Grampian of all people, with a factory in Maidenhead by 1968. Kitted out YTV with a fair bit of kit when they launched.

It was more the text being the same word in an almost identical font