question about cabooses

[bigbo1988]

 me and my mother are having a fight about cabooses,dont ask me how it got started because i dont remember xD but she said all cabooses where red it wasn't till the 80's or the 90's that cabooses started changing colors to match the railroad company but i think she wrong i think cabooses started changing colors to match their company around the early 1900s.that alot of them keep to the basic red color but more and more of them when they needed a new paint job or a new one was built they changed into what their railroad company colors where.so who right me or her? xD

[CSSHEGEWISCH]

I'm not sure about earlier dates but I can remember cabooses in the late 1950's-early 1960's in colors other than red. South Shore and EJ&E were in orange, IHB began to repaint to jade green, C&O was changing to yellow, there are probably others.

[K4sPRR]

Sorry Mom.  The caboose which has its roots as far back as 1840 was typically painted red for visibility.  Change in colors bacame common during the mid to late 1940's when variations appeared to match the colors used on this new creature, the diesel locomotive.  Also the railroads logo started appearing more and more.  By the 1980's many cabooses were no longer in use and went to the local scrapper.

[wjstix]

In the 19th century, red was commonly used for railroad cars, barns, outbuildings, fences etc. because it was a hard durable paint made from dirt or clay containing iron ore. Before artificial paint colors were introduced in 1859, paint color had to come from natural things like plants or animals...or dirt. Of course this tuscan red also had the advantage of being "dirt" cheap since it didn't use any expensive or rare things for the color. It was only later that a bright red came to be used for barns or what-have-you. People just ordered "red paint" and started getting bright red instead of the rusty tuscan red they had gotten before.

Anyway...red (either bright red or tuscan red) was the most common caboose color into the 1960's. At that time, railroads started painting cabooses in similar colors to those they used on their diesels and passenger cars. For example, Great Northern cabooses were vermillion red until the introduction of "Big Sky Blue" in 1967, when cabooses were painted the same blue as the engines and passenger cars. I grew up along the Minneapols Northfield and Southern, they used red cabooses into the early sixties when they started painting them the same dark blue as the engines. In the sixties NP had some green and yellow cabooses, and the Burlington had silver ones. I think CNW started painting cabooses yellow somewhere around 1970.

However before that, red certainly wasn't the only color used. The Duluth Missabe and Iron Range used yellow cabooses at least as far back as the 1938 merger that created the railroad, and I think either the DM&N or D&IR (or both) used yellow before that. The DMIR continued to use yellow to the end of cabooses on the road (despite a recent MR review of the Walthers Missabe caboose that says otherwise.)

[Deggesty]

Some time before the Central and the Pennsy tried to merge, NYC began painting its cabooses green.