National Express Group, the transport company that runs the coach business of the same name, will today reveal a new company-wide brand that is designed to link all its disparate coach, bus and rail operations.

The new livery retains National Express’s familiar red, white and blue logo, but, for the first time, the colours more usually seen shuttling students and pensioners up and down the country’s motorway network will be applied to some of the busiest train routes in the country and local buses from London to Birmingham.

The rebranding is being driven by Richard Bowker, the former head of the Strategic Rail Authority, who joined the company as chief executive last year. He told The Times that improvements to rail punctuality and performance achieved over the past few years meant that now it was possible to extend the well-known National Express name to all the company’s transport interests.

“When I joined this company, it was clear that we had fantastic operational skills. We had all these great businesses but it wasn’t clear that National Express Group ran them,” he said.

“The National Express name gets fantastic recognition. People trust it and that gives us a lot more confidence. Five or six years ago, we couldn’t have done it. The reliability of the rail business just wasn’t good enough and it would have damaged the group.”

The new logo is introduced as the National Express Group is on the verge of taking over the premium London-to-Edinburgh line – still considered the flagship of the rail network – which will become known as National Express East Coast.

National Express’s new branding, supported by a single internet portal and, eventually, an integrated booking system, will allow the company to target groups of customers across the country and help the brand to generate traffic on each of its businesses.

“Like most transport companies, we treated our customers as passengers, not as customers, but consumers are so much more demanding now than they were five years ago. They want quality of service provided by a big network,” Mr Bowker said. “National Express has all those things and we want to present an image that our people can be proud of.”

The rebranding comes at a crucial time for the company. It is about to launch and take over several new businesses and rail franchises. Today, the company will unveil its new dot2dot airport transfer service, which will carry passengers in 76 Volkswagen people carriers from Heathrow to hotels in Central London. Next month it will take over GNER’s staff and trains and begin a ten-year franchise to run the East Coast Main Line, after a competition in which it bid £1.4 billion for the network.

In January, the company will open its British divisional headquarters in Birmingham and in February it will rename its “one” railway franchise from Liverpool Street station, replacing the much-mocked “one” name with the brand National Express East Anglia.

Early in the new year, the new National Express livery will begin to appear on the company’s coaches and also on the company’s urban bus services, which operate under a variety of names, including Travel West Midlands. The cost of rebranding is understood to be hundreds of thousands of pounds, although the company would have had to rebrand trains and uniforms anyway, as a condition of taking over the East Coast franchise.

National Express carries about one billion passengers a year, making it Britain’s joint-second-biggest transport operator. It also has sizeable business interests in North America and Spain. Since Mr Bowker joined the group last August, he has completed the acquisition of Continental Auto, a Spanish bus company, for £450 million and succeeded in winning the franchise for the East Coast Main Line after losing two other rail franchise competitions. He has also completed a handful of smaller bolt-on acquisitions in niche markets.

The National Express coach brand first appeared in 1973 and began to be a familiar sight on vehicles in 1978.

Times Recommends

• C&G axed - 1,660 jobs to be lost
• UK house prices rise 1.1% as buyers return
• Mixed reaction to US banks repaying bailouts