Read the attached today regarding less than car load experiment by NS. Maybe they will come up with a colorful per diem days paint job for the new (or old new) rolling stock.
Yeah, don’t count on that. Modern boxcars are pretty spartan in their lettering. Shortline marks (used by proxy by leasing companies) are common, splashy paint jobs are not.
These GATX cars are pretty cool in blue:
http://canadianfreightcargallery.ca/cgi-bin/image.pl?i=lrs100195&o=lrs
but most new boxcars (other than TTX/Railbox’s yellow and black cars) in the last few years are just plain brown:
http://canadianfreightcargallery.ca/cgi-bin/image.pl?i=aok115182&o=aok
http://canadianfreightcargallery.ca/cgi-bin/image.pl?i=coer173449&o=coer
If anything, freight cars in general, will probably become even more spartan in paint and lettering. The situation has reached the point where reporting marks and data are now being applied as high up as possible, to remain visible. Perhaps freight cars spend too much time standing still?
NS promotes LCL? What’s old has become new again…!
The problem nowadays is that railroads aren’t going to spend a lot of money painting boxcars (or any other car) just to have them covered up with graffiti.
Until that issue is solved you aren’t going back to the good old days of colorful paint schemes.
Even if you could prevent graffiti the large railroads aren’t going to spend money on fancy or colorful paint schemes. Cutting costs to the bone and beyond is the current mantra.
I’m surprised they don’t just have cars delivered in primer and park them where the “street artists” can paint them for free.
Jeff
Railroads were once in competition with each other, and used their freight cars to “show the flag”.
Now, there’s only, what, 4 major railroads. And no competition.
No incentive.
Ed
I imagine a lot of shippers decided to shy away from displaying their corporate image on rolling stock in light of some of the high-profile derailments, especially those with haz-mat consequenses, when these images show up in all the media outlets.
Nothing worse than your Gerber Baby Food boxcar being shown on the nightly news with a burning tank car in the background and talk of evacuated neighborhoods and smoke seen for miles around. Not a warm and fuzzy PR event.
Cheers, Ed
Having to sit at a grade crossing waiting for one of today’s freight trains to pass reveals a different world on today’s rails. When I was a kid, growing up in the 1950s, counting the cars of a passing freight train was, a window into corporate pride and, a geography lesson. In an age not poisoned by ambulance chasers, refiners and chemical compnies were glad to have rolling billboards for their products. Today, tank cars are no longer labeled with their intended cargoes. This a combination of potential terroristic targeting and having your company’s name and logos clearly visible on that tank car burning behind Ed’s Gerbers Baby Food car. The earlier freight train also carried cars with the names of many other companies we regularly found in our refrigerators
Another potential problem is pilferage in transit. It is a big problem in the transportation of new vehicles but, hits other types of freight as well. Anyone remember the white MHLX RBLs with the red Miller Brewing emblem on them? Would it be wise for a clearly marked car of beer or any other widely desirable commodity to attempt to travel from shipper to receiver, on today’s rails?
Railroads want no part of owning a roster of freight cars. With all the vagaries of the American economy, the railroads would be happier simply coupling onto your car and pulling it over state-owned rails to your customer’s town. Notice I said “town” not “door”? Railroads only want to operate on the mainlines, not the spurs and yards. In todays speak, it will be known as “hub-to-hub” transportation. If you want it in Dallas, we’ll get it there-but you’ll have come get it-we don’t deliver!
Another glaring indicator of the railroads desire to shed the responsibility of maintaining a car fleet is the number of cars with reporting marks endin
By Federal Law tank cars containing hazardous materials are REQUIRED to be labeled and placarded with the commodities they carry. They used to just have a generic hazard class placard, now they have a more specific UN number, so pretty much anybody can figure out what’s in a tank car and whether its hazardous.
And more specifically, cars sprecifically tailored to the commodities the customer hauls. That’s why tank cars were private cars, there are dozens of specifications of linings, construction, pressures, fittings, insulation, etc . that tailor a tank car to the commodity its hauling. A tank car for one commodity won’t work for other commodities. Chemicals in covered hoppers, same thing.
It’s always been like that. Way back when, it was called “the team track” - you hitched your team to the wagon and went down and unloaded the boxcar yourself
The Nittany and Bald Eagle rr. Already mostly operates as a hub to team track operation. They have a few online customers but most are off line using team tracks. Of note is how those team tracks have stuff like small warehouses and tanks and bins and such owned by the team track user so they don’t pay much for the car sitting loaded or unloaded, waiting to be loaded or unloaded. I can see the main carriers doing hub to hub while short line/regonals do hub to door or hub to team track. Not sure which track the flaming gerber food car would be on while the news shows it with hazmat evacuation notice. What is in that formula anyway?
Shane
Naw, it is way more simple than that: why bother? The side of a railcar isn’t a particularly valuable ad space, even when you already own the ad space, so why bother on the minimal ROI.
DC Metro’s main advertiser is itself. They can’t sell the side of buses, insides of subway stations, and the inside of subway cars to anyone. And that’s an ad space you can sell to third parties, unlike the side of your boxcar. No one is going to be like “you know, I just saw a fancy CSX paint job, so the next time I need to ship 500,000 tons of wheat, I know who I’ll use.”
There was a reason boxcar LCL died out, the real question is whether those reasons have changed. Actually LCL never left the railroad, it just converted to TOFC and a third party did the sorting. A lot of the boxcar business converted to TOFC/COFC.
There are still warehousing/logistics operators that ship what is basically “LCL” in boxcars, but they’re just not run by the railways, and not located in every town with rail service.
I seem to recall UP running LCL trains between Portland, OR and City of Industry, CA about 2000. If I remember correctly the trains consisted of a couple of GP60s and a few dozen 50’, excess height boxcars.