Box car colors

Model Railroader Prototype information for the modeler
1

I have a specific and a general question regarding box car colors.

  1. What year did the NYC adopt the jade green color for it’s box cars. In his December MR editorial, Terry Thompson suggested that it occurred sometime between 1956 and 1962 but he wasn’t specific about the year.

  2. In general, when did railroads switch from the standard box car red to a rainbow of colors that I see in so much of the model rolling stock available today. I purchased MR’s Modeling Railroads of the 1950s and it states that this change began in the 1950s but how prevalent was it. Most of the color pictures I see from that era show most of the rolling stock in box car red. Since this is the era I am modeling, I’d like to get a realistic mix of the old and new colors.

2

I believe the NYC introduced the Jade Green scheme in 1958, the last year they ran steam.

As for the circus colors, it started in the mid-1950s with paint schemes like New Haven’s orange and black and B&M’s red, white and blue scheme. But it really got started after 1959. The CB&Q introduced their Chinese Red scheme with the delivery of the “first” second-generation power, the GP20. After about 1960 or so, everyone got into the game, with all sorts of barf-tastic bright colors.

3

The GN, for another example, changed over from mineral red to vermillion in
about 1957. Then continued changing with Glacier Green in about 1961 and
finally (blecchh) Big Sky Blue in April of 1967.

4

Let’s not forget the DT&I. They went nuts with colorful paint schemes on their auto parts cars :slight_smile:

5

I suggest you model whatever you think looks good. But do this: weather the boxcar red cars a lot and the colorful cars just a bit, so they look brand-new. Then proportions won’t matter so much. For variety, get one colorful car, bang it up some, and put it in a train as a bad-order car going back to the shop! (Car number 666 maybe?)

6

One factor was certainly the diesel - before that, colors were pretty much set: Black engines, red cabooses, yellow reefers, gray covered hoppers, dark green passenger cars , and basically everything else black or mineral red. Once they realized diesels didn’t have to be black, and started painting them different eye-catching colors, they started to think about using brighter colors for freight and passenger cars too.

A little later - maybe c.1960 - railroads got the idea of creating a “corporate image”, painting all their equipment (cars, cabooses, engines) the same shade of blue or red or whatever.