I’ve heard that BNSF originally did intend to paint up diesels for each of the old railroads (GN, NP, ATSF, etc.), but finally decided time and money wouldn’t allow it, so settled for adding ‘stickers’ to a few engines instead.
The Pumpkin paintjob IS a heritage paint scheme. It’s a Great Northern paint scheme with a few ATSF hints on it. At least that’s true for Heritage 1 and Heritage 2. The Swoosh scheme is less so.
I wondered about that too. I understand that merging railroads aquire the trademarks of the predecessor lines. While Conrail was split between NS and CSX, I noticed that NS got the PRR reporting marks, and CSX got the NYC reporting marks. However, NS painted a NYC heritage loco. Maybe the surviving PC entity kept rights to the trademarks.
NS got one of the best, busiest, and most visible parts of the former NYC. CSX’s only major ex-PRR route is the backwater St. Louis Line. After Conrail got done rehabbing it, it looked like an ex-NYC line complete with Type G “V” light signals. Not a lot of PRR heritage or esprit de corps left from what I could tell when I railfanned the line back in the late 80’s/early 90’s.
However, that PRR line is enough to have ‘trashed’ the former B&O’s St. Louis Division between Cincinnati and E.St. Louis.
Well half out it. The east portion of the PRR route between Indy and Terre Haute was abandoned by Conrail. The NYC/Big Four was the real B&O killer. The only reason the PRR line was kept west of Terre Haute was that it was shorter and had a decent sized yard in East St. Louis (Rose Lake). Conrail effectively had to “NYC” it in the 1980’s to bring it up to modern standards. As Alfred Perlman once observed, the PRR really was a “wooden-wheeled” railroad.
Also, blame CSX. While Conrail was investing in routes and improving traffic flows, CSX was doing nothing. Personally, I think both CSX and NS knew that one day they would eventually snatch Conrail and split it up one way or another. There was no point in investing in their own directly competing routes. A lot of CSX’s perplexing abandonments in the 1980’s make a lot more sense when this eventuality is taken into consideration.
Seaboard is 1982!
CSX is smart by coming up with heritage units that are a blend of historic and current. It’s distinctive from the NS heritage fleet.
And the Conrail “Q” is 1976
The first Chessie units came new from EMD in 1972, not 1973.
Chessie wasn’t incorporated until 1973. They were just getting a head start on painting locomotives in the new scheme, not unlike the Kodachrome units on the Santa Fe and Southern Pacific.
We could still be seeing, among others (and not counting the Conrail split):
Atlantic Coast Line
Seaboard Airline
Louisville & Nashville
Western Maryland
Chesapeake & Ohio
Richmond, Fredericksburg & Potomac
Nashville, Chattanooga & St. Louis
Pere Marquette
Atlanta, Birmingham & Coast
There are numerous others depending how far out on the limbs and branches of the family tree they want to go.
Did anyone else here get the Facebook Post sent out by Conrail, mocking CSX for their CSX - Conrail heritage unit? It’s pretty humorous. It looks like the Conrail logo is backwards as well but I am not an expert.
From that picture it looks like ConRail swung both ways.
I have to admit it hasn’t really grown on me. It still seems very garish, especially compared to B&O blue.
The Conrail logo has the C (which is a stylized pair of wheels on track) the same way as Chessie has the broken dish (which is the reverse silhouette of a sleeping kitten complete with the edge of an ear).
Conrail Quality came along much later. I thought it had something to do with leased-out power but never bothered to find out exactly.
The original B&O Blue, Gray, Black and Gold has always been #1. The all blue period sucked. Chessie was a breath of ‘fresh air’ and color.
I always thought it was a nod to the concept of “Total Quality Management” that came into vogue in the corporate world around that time.
That was about the same point in time that CSX changed their merchandise train ID’s from being R trains for Regular into Q trains for Quality…ie R137 became Q137.
In the past year or so, CSX has moved on from that system of train identities to another based on L for Local, M for Merchandise, C for Coal and other letters for other types of traffic.