From the jointlinefrilfans.io forum. BNSF will be painting five engines in special paint schemes to celebrate their twenty fifth aniversery. According to the post three ES44SAC’s are already at MAC in Kansas City being painted. The five units selected are allegedly BNSF 5872, 6017, 6022, 6078, & 6111, all ES44AC’s. They supposedly will be released in September.
Ira
OK, I’ll bite.
Great Northern orange and green
Northern Pacific two tone green
CB&Q Chinese Red
Frisco red and white
Sante Fe dark blue and yellow from the FT era
Good article from Jan 2020
I hope to see some Cascade Green with a nose covered in white stripes!!
I’ll rain on the parade. I’m skeptical about the whole thing until there’s an official announcement from Fort Worth.
More than likely the red/silver warbonnet
First unit is out; an orange version of the BN “Pacific Pride” units.
From the BNSF Facebook page – oh ye of little faith!
“Keep an eye out, and you might spot something different leading a BNSF Railway train! This is the first of 10 locomotives that will help celebrate the 25th Anniversary of the merger that formed BNSF Railway by sporting logos of our historic predecessor lines. It’s going operational tomorrow and another nine will follow over the next few weeks … Let us know if you spot one of these special locomotives! We’d love to see pictures.”
Let’s all do just that! I know I’ll be watching… but it does have to be said that all ten might be exactly the same, orange units with all the different logos on them.
In other words stickers placed on the side of the carbody-no retro paint jobs. And one of the most boring logos of all of the major railroads-you can’t do something new after 25 years.
It’s the first of 10. Let’s see what the other 9 bring (hopefully something more substantial).
As said prior, it’s a reboot of the original BN Pacific Pride engine.
If stickers are all they do then honestly it’s a bit of a disappointment. But when you come right down to it they don’t have to do anything.
I’d love to see a resurrection of those classic paint schemes like the Great Northern, Northern Pacific, CB&Q, and Santa Fe had, but then I wouldn’t be the one paying for it.
You guys need to think way outside the box. Entities that own stadiums figured out how to make an extra buck. Why does the paint job even have to be railroad related? They could cover the locomotive with advertizing. Think big: Microsoft, Mountain Dew, Budweiser! [:-,]
Nothing is new under the sun. Some of us remember when the Railway Express Agency used to place ads on the sides of its delivery trucks and semi-trailers.
Somewhere I still have a copy of the artwork from the initial marketing guy for the T1 Trust that has the tender decked out in supergraphic Coca-Cola red and white script. (Ties in with Tuscan-red collector cans made with ‘real sugar’ and twice the caffeine…)
I assume everyone here has seen Kelly Lynch’s Coke commercial with 765, a different but certainly no less effective way to do promotion.
The skins I developed for the ‘New London Bus’ competition would allow this sort of thing to be loaded and run, including animation, just like modern billboards…
All of goods and services owned by Berkshire could be advertised on the side of BNSF locos…Geico, Dairy Queen, Duracell, Steelcase…
Most of those were designed by General Motors - EMD to make their E and F cab units look better.
UNTIL BNSF releases the locomotives, everyone is just speculating on what the paint schemes will be. NOTHING official has been said about which paint schemes will be uses.
I started railfanning in the 1950’s. Back then they were called “heralds”. Nobody ever heard the word “logo” then.
It’s been done! But not often though. I’ve seen photos of Amtrak NEC locomotives “skinned” with advertising, also some NJ Transit units.
Why it’s not done more often as a revenue source I couldn’t say.
Via Rail used to have a bunch of wrapped ad locomotives. Kool-Aid, Spiderman, Home Hardware and Telus come to mind, though there were more. The Quebec lottery one was the worst, it ended up looking like a giant turd as the paint faded.
There may be issues with not offending competitors or other shippers – see some of the discussions around the Marlboro Express “Thunder” project. There have been some famous advocacy paint schemes, including for local sports teams and the Olympics.
I suspect if there were better mobile ‘wrap’ teams, with railroad safety savvy, a better pitch could be made to transit authorities or various freight operators. Although I have latently-suppressed, terrible by dim recollection memories of something involving Amtrak and libraries that leads me to start finding excuses not to facilitate this sort of thing…