If you look at the paint scheme’s used on C&O’s old EMD “bulldog” type diesels, you have
This:
And then there is the following one that is commonly called “second generation”:
And then there is the following, that I am trying to get a better understanding of:
What do they call this third style depicted? Is this just an evolutionary style thing, or was there a more deliberate reason behind the difference?
I’m certainly not an expert railfan !! The last scheme looks like the Pere Marquette scheme.
That seems to be it, THANKS, much appreciated.
So then the picture is probably a “patch”?
The third scheme was limited to the E7A’s which were ordered by Pere Marquette for its streamliners and delivered to C&O after the merger.
There was also an experimental scheme which may have been applied to only one or two F’s which was all black with white zebra stripes on the bulldog nose.
Just the E7’s ? Was that a new scheme they were planning to adopt, but the merger interrupted those plans?
The paint scheme illustrated on C&O 98 was very much based on what had first appeared on E7s delivered directly to the Pere Marquette. The yellow “waves” were undoubtedly the inspiration for the similar feature on the C&O’s early cab units (which used a darker yellow, by the way).
When C&O got its first E8s, they were painted very much like the F7s shown in the first photo–blue and yellow. This was later changed to a blue, yellow, and gray paint scheme that blended in better with the lightweight passenger cars, All of the cab-unit paint schemes went through varying degrees of simplification before degenerating to blue with a little bit of gray for the C&O passenger units and solid blue with yellow for the freight units.
The “zebra” paint scheme was applied to a few Fs, an FP7, and three or four Geeps, all around 1961.