Greetings,
When railroads merge now adays do they only repaint a certain percentage of equipment for cost purposes?
I live near the ole FW&D in Texas and all I see is BN Cascade green and Sante Fe colors with a low percent of the new BNSF Paint scheme.
The merger happened about 7 years ago?
Mark in Texas
They paint 'em when they go in for major overhaul, mostly – but I believe that BNSF is deliberately keeping at least some of its equipment in some of the older paint schemes – intelligent, as some of the older schemes were pretty darn good!
For a long time the BNSF has had slight differences in the paint scheme of their locomotives. To be honest with you I always liked that, because the paint was fairly consistent in the number series of the locomotive. When you walked on to the diesel pit area to find the locomotive consist, it could be picked out at a distance without being close enough to read the numbers.
When the KCS bought the Midsouth in 1993, the KCS didn’t repaint ANY of Midsouth’s engines because they had no intentions of keeping them long term.
However, when the Midsouth was born in 1986, they almost immediately started repainting ALL of their former IC/ICG locomotives. When the Midsouth purchased the North Louisiana & Gulf (1987) and the Corinth & Counce (1989?), they didn’t touch them because they had no Intentions of keeping these yard-switcher-model locomotives.
Here in Maryland only around 1 of 30 pieces of BNSF equiptment still have old colors or original logo.
As mentioned in various other postings, a full repaint job usually comes when the equipment is shopped for maintenance. Freight cars go a long time between shoppings so they will often stay in their old colors and reporting marks for quite a while.
Locomotives are a little different. While a full repainting will often wait for a scheduled visit to the shop, relettering and renumbering will often be done more quickly since locomotive numbers are also used for operations purposes.
BNSF has been fairly quick on relettering and renumbering without a full repaint but I’ve noticed that until recently UP did everything at once or nothing at all. The patch renumberings on UP are quite recent relative to the merger dates involved.
Up here in Minnesota the predominant scheme is the new scheme which I call
“Pumpkin Head” livery. You still see the old BN green & white and the Brunswick
Green & Creme, but mostly the new pattern.
Are these the same locomotives (or type of locomotives) you had around there before the merger? Could there be a reason that they are staying down your way, such as air conditioning, certain signal requirements, etc? We have mostly new power on the old BN here around Chicago, save for local assignments.
I know that on the UP around here, a lot of the M-class manifests get former CNW SD40-2s. They’re repainted and renumbered into the UP 2900 and 3000 series, but they hang around here because they’re equipped with the CNW’s ancient cab signal/ATC system (and possibly equally-ancient ATS shoes for service on lines toward Milwaukee). And if you see an intermodal train headed by these SD40-2s, you know that Global 3 (Rochelle) will be as far west as it goes.
I saw 4 diffrent bnsf schemes this weekend.cascade green warbonnet red and heritage 1 and 2 schemes.all run through power on csx.
stay safe
Joe