Are the freight cars of a RR that is merged into another typically repainted? I still see Conrail cars so I know that not all cars are repainted but I don't know if that is the norm.
Rick
Yes, eventually for the most part. The cars are repainted as they cycle through their normal rebuild/repaint/refurbish cycles.
But a newer car could go decades before it's rebuilt or repainted. An older car might never be rebuilt or repainted, just used until scrapped.
Repainting with new initials isn't necessarily a high priority. There is also the case where the cars are part of an equipment trust, so they could be repainted and still retain the original intials. Lots of repainted MP and SP boxcars with UP heralds on them.
Dave H. Painted side goes up. My website : wnbranch.com
dehusmanBut a newer car could go decades before it's rebuilt or repainted. An older car might never be rebuilt or repainted, just used until scrapped.
Youtube's Virtural Railfan frequent shows Fallen Flags in their video of the day. They pause the video and show a car as it was painted back in the day. They are all very well weathered cars.
Henry
COB Potomac & Northern
Shenandoah Valley
Heck, BNSF has been running cascade green power longer than there was a Burlington Northern in the first place
They start by just repainting the numbers then eventually they get around to painting the entire car but it can take years.
Just watched one of the VR videos for 7/2/23 and on just one day their cameras caught:
As I understand, it is not a high priority. A freight car in the shop getting painted isn't making any money, so taking them out of revenue service is generally not a priority. Remember, not only do you have to take it off the road, you also have to ship it to a depot, which burns fuel, and it's probably empty (unless by luck there is a load going in the right direction), and you can only put so many cars over a given piece of railroad track at a time. So it really is an expensive proposition.
As I understand it, repainting would be done at an opportune moment -- when a car comes into the railroad's service facility for significant repair or overhaul.
Aaron
Are freight cars routinely repainted? At what intervals? Are the cars painted "box car red" because iron oxide pigment is cheap, or because the color hides rust?
1. Are freight cars routinely repainted?
Yes.
2. At what intervals?
No set interval, when they rebuilt or a class is to be upgraded. Highly variable.
3. Are the cars painted "box car red" because iron oxide pigment is cheap, or because the color hides rust?
Combination of the two.
There are times when a post-merger patch job might incorporate the new entitie's colors behind the expensive and time consuming lettering awaiting the full repaint at a later date:
PC_X58 by Edmund, on Flickr
P-C_hopper by Edmund, on Flickr
I recall in the early Penn Central days there were still some New York Central Pacemaker box cars roaming around. It was a treat to see them.
NYC_Pacemaker-weathered by Edmund, on Flickr
Regards, Ed
dehusman2. At what intervals? No set interval, when they rebuilt or a class is to be upgraded. Highly variable.
For cars not getting a rebuild, might they never get repainted? Is there a default setting for the life span of a paint job?
There is no limit on how long a paint job can last.
By Federal Law a freight car can only be in interchange service for 40 years before it has to be rebuilt (50 years now).
After 40 years it has to be either rebuilt or put in company or on line only service. A car could go 50-60 years combined revenue and company service. In most cases once it's put in company service it's repainted so it's obvious it's not in revenue service or restricted in use.
Another good example of freight cars (and other rolling stock) in fallen schemes ts to look at the BN for the first 10 years after it formed from the NP, GN, CB&Q (FW&D and C&S) and the SP&S (co-owned by the NP and the GN). Some of the stock was painted almost immediately into Cascade Green (newer engines and freight cars), some didn't get painted until the mid 70s and some never did during the period mentioned. That's why that era was called the "BN Rainbow." You could see Big Sky Blue, Omaha Orange, Glacier Green, Box Car Red, Mineral Red, Chinese Red, Gray, NP Dark and Light Greens, NP and BN Yellows, Silver, Aluminum, and Cascade Green (of course).
For reference, I model BN rainbow (and prototlance) so I say that the only colors you wouldn't see in my rolling stock are gold and purple.
Some railroads obsess more than others about "re-branding" and repainting freight cars and locomotives in the new corporate colors and logos.
There are fallen flags and there are fallen flags. When the UP acquired CNW, MoPac and SP, it owned the logos and retained use of their reporting marks and original car numbers -- there was no urgency to repaint the cars or even change the reporting marks to UP. Indeed they even had brand new cars with legacy reporting marks such as the Chicago Minneapolis and Omaha because they were running out of numbers for cars marked UP. Similarly they started lettering some locomotives UPY so they could re-use numbers.
That is more or less the situation with BNSF and its component parts, the BN and the ATSF, and was the situation with the BN itself and its component parts. No rush to new reporting marks because the old ones still were usable.
But a railroad like the Rock Island which went absolutely bankrupt and is gone -- its assets were acquired but not the railroad -- those cars were typically patched quickly with the new reporting marks of the new owner. You'd see Route Rock covered hoppers for years with the old logo BUT their new CNW reporting marks. There might be some still around but time is running out.
Dave Nelson
Sitting here reading this thread wearing a Dragon Hops brewery shirt. That's a fallen flag, too. They had a brewery in a small town in Virginia, but it didn't succeed.
Fallen flags exist in many businesses, I guess. The fact that we remember them indicates that small groups of us still had a liking for their products, even though the public at large didn't support them. Things get boring when everything is the same.
It takes an iron man to play with a toy iron horse.
My layout is set mostly in the late '30s, so most of my rolling stock is appropriate for that time-frame, and that, of course, applies to my several freelanced railroads, too.
I have painted all of my freelanced stuff (likely somewhere around 600 or 700 hundred pieces), plus dozens of locomotives that I have painted and lettered for others (usually friends or acquaintances). I'll probably scratchbuild another couple dozen freight and passenger cars, and then get back to finishing-off the layout's scenery, hopefully before I reach the end of the line.
Wayne
I model the Transition Era, so fallen flags are not really important on my layout. I mostly model the Milwaukee, so I have lots of home-road rolling stock and legitimate foreign-road traffic. I've created a few cars painted for local industries to connect local structures to railroad traffic. Not strict prototype, but I think it adds rather than detracts from the models.
MidlandMike For cars not getting a rebuild, might they never get repainted? Is there a default setting for the life span of a paint job?
I have seen cars in the 2020s in original factory 1970s paint.
Chris van der Heide
My Algoma Central Railway Modeling Blog
hbgatsf Are the freight cars of a RR that is merged into another typically repainted? I still see Conrail cars so I know that not all cars are repainted but I don't know if that is the norm.
The new railroad absorbs all the assets of the old one including reporting marks etc. so there isn't necessarily any requirement to change the reporting marks or numbers on the acquired cars.
What happens is entirely up to the new railroad.
Some railroads will remark and renumber the old railway's equipment into their own number system. At least initially in this case, most equipment will just get the original markings and numbers painted over. Some never will, and will leave the original reporting marks on the cars, even if the car is later repainted into the new companies colours.
Here's a nice example of that. DT&I was purchased by GTW, which is a CN subsidiary. Here's a nice boxcar with DTI reporting marks and GT logo:
http://canadianfreightcargallery.ca/cgi-bin/image.pl?i=dti26591&o=dti
And one in fresh CN paint with CN logos:
http://canadianfreightcargallery.ca/cgi-bin/image.pl?i=dti25168&o=dti
Lots of old Illinois Central cars have also been repainted for CN, but CN keeps the original reporting marks and numbers:
http://canadianfreightcargallery.ca/cgi-bin/image.pl?i=ic245320&o=ic
CN has also made use of subsidiary reporting marks on new cars as well, with brand new cars featuring IC, GTW, WC, and DWC reporting marks. Canadian Pacific has done the same with brand new cars with SOO reporting marks. And CSX reintroduced NYC reporting marks to renumber cars acquired in the Conrail split with NS. Since these reporting marks were still owned by the successor companies, they can still be used.
Some railroads will be more aggressive about "re-branding" than others, with shopping and repainting cars. Others will just repaint cars into the new company's colours as they naturally get shopped and come through for repainting.
Some cars will never get a full repaint into the new company's colours.
Even if say if one railroad simply bought some cars secondhand, then the reporting marks MUST be changed, which indicate the ownership BUT there's no requirement to paint out anything else, so you can see cars with fully intact logos of one railroad and the reporting marks indicating ownership by another, like this Penn Central car that was transferred to DT&I:
http://canadianfreightcargallery.ca/cgi-bin/image.pl?i=dti220881&o=dti
Thanks for all of the replies. I brought this up because there are times when I find some freight cars on sale, but while they represent a car that could still be in service in my time frame (1983) the railroads no longer existed. I am by no means a rivet counter but I do like a bit of realism in what I run considering we are 40 years past 1983 and most would not remember what exactly was on the rails at that time. If those cars didn't necessarily need to be repainted by the acquiring road I can appreciate the bargain I got and move on without giving it another thought.