Today I stopped to take a picture of an ex Southern covered hopper that was hauling soybeans to make vegtable oil at Cargill in Gainesville, GA. It’s numbers and letters had been whitewashed but were still readable. Then I noticed the old red and black NS lettering in the upper right corner. Apperently this car had been painted in original NS colors at one time.
When was the merger? Could this have actually been an original piece? It had Southern 90635 painted over it I think. Then they had tried to paint that out and it had PLCX 166 27 5309. The PLCX numbers were also two different fonts. It was a mess of a car!
I will post pictures when I get them developed, but I was curious if this could have been an original car.[;)]
Norfolk Southern Corporation was created in 1982 by the merging of the Norfolk and Western Railway and Southern Railway, hence the name Norfolk Southern. As far as equipment, I have no clue! I do know that when freight traffic was still running over Saluda Grade here (discontinued December 2001) most of the hoppers were still painted with Southern lettering.
timeout
Norfolk southern was a name of a shortline rr in northcarolina a southern subsidary.when the 2 big rrs wanted to merge they changed their name to Carolina and Northwestern. So then they took that name to Washington.Now you know the rest of the story.
stay safe
Joe
I’d never heard that before. I thought the name was created when the two joined later, hadn’t heard of the short line in N.C. Interesting and sorry for the mis-information.
most all todays norfolk southerns equipment still has Southern and Norfolk and Western on it Still. I just wi***hey would keep Southern or NW on there locomotives instead of that plain colors they have today.
I know up to 10 to 12 years ago you could still see Southern EMDs running on the Norfolk Southern lines. I guess they were all slowly replaced or retired.
I’ll stake my reputation as a freight-carchaeologist on my statement that there are no “old NS” cars operating today lettered as such. I was able to scrounge up about 24 box cars in a couple of Southern series that have NS ancestry…couldn’t tell you how many more might be lettered for the new NS at this point.
The series of PLCX covered hoppers mentioned before was one of NS’ newest batch of cars, 150 cars originally in NS series 5300-5449, later SOU 90850-90999. Some of the PLCX cars have since migrated elsewhere, including to various shortlines (I think DME might be one of them).
If you see any “high short hood” locomotives,they’re originally N&W/SOU equipment.There should be some still around,although the new GE/EMD power is taking over rapidly. Still like the old Southern freight engine colors though.
Thanks, but I was actually just refering to the old NS paint scheme still being visible. I went on vacation and haven’t gotten that role developed, but I did find a very similar car in the picture below. I’ll post a pic of the one that I saw soon.
I just thought that it was interesting that any of the original lettering had remained on these GE leasers. Thanks for the info all!
That PLCX series is probably about the only one that would be likely to show old NS lettering (maybe the Southern lettering will bleed through eventually, too!).
Isn’t it fun to find out about the past just from experiences like this?
While slightly off-topic, the original Norfolk Southern was taken over by the Southern Railroad some time in the early 1960s. I can recall photos in Trains Magazine of the “old” NS locomotive equipment, GP18s as I recall which had been built with low noses and short hood leading cab layout, being repainted in the SOU black, gold and grey, and being rebuilt to high short hood and long end leading.
These photos were all black and white of course, but I thought the “old” NS colours were silver and black, possibly with red lettering. Can anyone confirm this?
Did any “old” NS locomotives last long enough to be lettered “new” NS?
Of course, the “old” Norfolk Southern had steam locomotives, so you could letter a model steam locomotive “Norfolk Southern” if you wanted to. Their steam locomotives were black with white lettering, like the current system diesel colours (but without the horse, of course). Off the top of my head, I think they had quite small 2-8-4s as their last steam power.
Since the Southern owned the name “Norfolk Southern” it would have been the logical name for the SOU/N&W merger.
Was done by George Drury(hope thats right) for Trains.should be here in this website or in their rr guidebooks that Kalbach publishes.[:)]
stay safe
Joe
