I am planning the colors for my Southern Railway freight fleet and was considering having my freight cars painted black. I have never seen any real cars painted black, and was wondering if I painted mine black if it would look odd. Is black just a color you don’t paint freight cars or is there a rhyme or reason to it(heat absorbtion). I was thinking painting the car black, with a white door.
Do you think it would be odd to have black freight cars?
-Smoke
The Lehigh & New England RR didn’t think so!
All you need is a string of coal hoppers. Most of them are black, or rusty.
SP had overnights that were black , so no , not so odd.
I’ve seen many black freight cars come through Leesville over the years, from many different roads. Most of them are tank cars, flatcars, gondolas, hoppers and boxcars.
Now that you mention it, I only have one black box car. (don’t remember what line?) It’s an old 40 footer and I don’t know if it had a prototype.
N&W had black boxcars.
The New Haven Railroad had black freight cars as well. I suppose the important question is if you are trying to model the protoype, what did they do and if not, what color do you wish to use? [:)]J.R.
C&O had black boxcars and gons as well as open hoppers.
A good ol’ ‘Green Light’ boxcar seems to work best…
But, hey, its your layout.
Somebody beat me to the draw but I was going to say that N&W had boxes painted black because I have a picture of one!
I just purchased some yellow SCL decals that go on a black 50’ boxcar.
Rick
The paint scheme wil be this one with a black paint instead on red paint, since it seems “normal”.
-Smoke
Smoke,
It’s 100% your call and your railroad, so you can do what you please, but I just have to ask, being the die-hard prototyper I am…
If you don’t mind my asking, why, when you know what color the prototype used, are you planning on using a non-prototype color? Just curious.
Dave,
Since I am modeling modern day Southern Railway I figured they would have started to paint freight cars a different color as some point in time. I thought black cars would look cool. since I don’t model a “true” prototype I can paint them whatever i want. I thought about it and thought black would look “the best” You got any suggestions as to what would be a beter color? I’m all ears for suggetions(except for pink and purple[;)]).
Smoke,
No offense intended! But if I did offer a suggestion, it would be to look at what NS is doing today. After all, NS is the merger of N&W and SOU (I know, among others), yet NS is doing boxcar red (a la SOU, as opposed to black per N&W). It seems less likely that an independent SOU would emulate N&W by switchng to black. Just a thought.
Of course, SOU did have those beautiful Crescent Green (is that what it was called?) steamers… A green boxcar with imitation gold lettering (like a “heritage” scheme on a modern car) might look really good! I kind of liked the Reading’s last boxcar sheme (green with yellow lettering).
Again, it’s 100% up to you! Good luck!
Economics play a huge part in deciding on a paint scheme for your locos and rolling stock. Of course you want to put the larger amounts of money into the equipment that costs the most like your locomotives so they tend to get the fancier more elaborate paint. You can see how this goes when a rail raod has more money the locos look “better” but as the railroad declines the paint jobs become alot more simple, just look at the Pennsy.
Now for rolling stock you usually see some uniformity in types of stock that are being painted. Some railroads have a standard that all boxcars, gondolas, tanks…etc must be painted, while others just use what is cheapest. Red Oxide, also known as Boxcar red or boxcar brown is a very cheap and easy color to produce, and fairly easy to maintain. Black is also easy to produce but shows dirt and grime better so it requires a little more to keep clean and nice looking.
All and all the color you choose is your choice. I am planning on using Black and WC Maroon for my locos and no decision yet on my SMRY rolling stock colors but I am going to take what I want my small railroads econimic situation to be as part of the deciding factors.
The D&H also had some black boxcars.
Remeber what Henry Ford said- “They can have it any colour they want, as long as its black!”
Go for it!
If you want to paint your cars black, then paint them black. However, the trend seems to be railroads going toward “boxcar red” or similar colors. UP is an example of this, and ATSF was another. Also, BNSF used to paint their some, perhaps half, of its cars green. It seems like all of the new car and repaints, with the exception of some covered hoppers, are a brownish color.