Lemme see. A continuous parade of brown square things with slightly different lettering on some but not all? Led by an always black thing?
Nah!!!
Ed
Who is actually pretty fond of such things.
I think growing up in that era started my love for boxcars and the icing on the cake was the colorful IPD short line boxcar era. Now I still see lots of boxcars and been noticing the freight leasing companies has started to branch out into the boxcar market so,now besides Railbox we are begining to see boxcars from other leasing companies.
I would add to Larry’s comments. While most boxcars of the classic era were some variant of red or brown, there were a few exceptions in green, black, and a very few more colorful ones. The great variety came in the ages and construction of cars, ranging from short to tall, short to long, and wood to composite to steel in many variations. The second source of interest was the many railroads that we now consider fallen flags, with their distinctive logos.
Tom
I would love to see a train… Nearest ones are 80 miles away and then there are only a couple of acid tank trains a week, one or 2 bauxite trains and the daily passenger train… We used to have a daily wood chip train here but they closed the line about 7 years ago and now another dead line in this state…
More than half the railroads in this state are closed or even completely ripped up…
The ones that are left of the state government railway only see grain trains and a couple of short lines have acid/bauxite and the other line is iron ore…
The national line(standard guage) has iron ore and containers plus a weekly passenger train inter state and a daily rural train…
It becomes a lot of long distance driving if you want train spot…
So back to my model trains and freelancing(theres way more action on the layout and the yard is still the start and the end of the line)…
As some one said, “its the mighty dollar”, that comes first…
This is one of the more interesting posts I have read in a while. There are many different and interesting opinions on then vs today. I grew up in MI and always thought a GTW GP-38 was boring. However when I went to the neighboring city on the Chessie, I never knew if I was going to see a B&O, C&O, or Chessie power. Today I miss all of them.
Today i live in OKC, and while I agree that some unit trains are boring they have aspects that are very interesting. Nothing worse than a BNSF covered hopper unit train, they don’t even have graffiti on them! Those are so boring. However as someone mentioned the intermodal trains can get interesting with the different trailers. While all the power is big six axle, you never know what road name might come through on the front or end of a train. Once in a while you will see a manifest come through town and it is fun to see if paint is fading and the previous road name show through. I have seen a Great Northern box car and an EL gondola in the last few years.
I am also lucky enough to work near the end of a branch line that has an auto receiving customer. They have their own GP-7, it is black and I can’t determine the original owner. So in the city I get to see a littlet bit of everything.
- I do miss the ATSF SD45-2 that used to come through as recent as 8 years ago.
For those that would like to see the older EMD switchers and Geeps railfan short lines and for the most part boxcars ladings are their bread and butter.
Its great to see a old GP9 pulling 6 or more boxcars…Some shorties still use a Alco end cab switcher as well…
As a kid growing up in southern Ontario, I railfanned (unaware of that term at the time) locally, pretty-well wherever I could walk or bike, or, from the back seat of Dad’s car when we got “stuck” at a crossing. Watching the plethora of roadnames rolling by was like looking at a map of North America (my hometown of Hamilton, Ontario was probably the most industrialised city in Canada) with rail cars from all over the continent, and four railroads serving the city. It mattered not that the cars were pretty-much all the same colours - boxcar red or black - because the cars themselves were so varied, even among ones of the same type…single sheathed, double sheathed, steel…low cars and high, short and long, clean or dirty, and new or almost at the end of their service life. I saw the end of steam and the takeover by diesels, so yes, the trains of today can be boring by comparison.
While I still do a little railfanning locally, a lot of the industry has left…mostly gone south or east, so train frequency isn’t what it had been.
The majority of my railfanning nowadays is done when visiting friends in Ohio and Pennsylvania, and while it’s definitely not like the old days, it definitely is interesting.
Both friends have railroading backgrounds, with knowledge of places the average fan wouldn’t be aware, and access to many sites where railfans wouldn’t necessarily be welcomed.
I see lots of intermodal trains (containers and trailers), Roadrailers, autoracks, coal trains, mixed trains, tank trains, and diesels from all of the major North American railroads. I’ve seen trains on headways so short that the locos of the second train can be photographed in the same frame as the last cars of the one ahead of it. I’ve been in scenic locales where waiting for the train is an enjoyable diversion, and when the trains are few and far between, the conversations can be as interesting as if a steam engine wer
While we are discussing old 40’ boxcars I would like to mention two of my all time favorites.
The West India Fruit & Steamship Company 40’ boxcar with a car ferry logo with Florida to Havana Railroad Car Ferries on the side of the ship. From the little research I did these boxcars hauled Cuban cigars and rum. WFI also owned reefers for hauling fruit.
My second all time favorite 40’ boxcar was GN’s Jade Geen,black ends with Rocky(GN’s goat) standing next to the slanted Great Northern.
I just realized nobody has mentioned an important difference between the trains of today and those of yore. Cabooses! Or vans, or waycars, or cabins, or what-have-you.
If a FRED is the period that ends a modern train’s sentence, then a caboose was more of an exclamation point in years past. Even if you missed seeing the engine, you knew the owning road by the livery and distinctive architecture of the caboose, accompanied by the flagman’s friendly wave.
That friendly wave is a reminder that railroads were, by and large, more welcoming to railfans in the past. I have a harder time warming up to people, or institutions, that are unfriendly to me.
Tom
Since young folk today have no point of reference to compare modern trains to old trains of 25 or 50 years ago, then how or why would they feel board by what they see? Does that make sense? They would be seeing trains as you did when you were young, and either be drawn to them or not. Some kids are naturally drawn to trains and some, probably most, don’t see them as anything special.
I might agree with you otherwise, but I have been watching trains since I was a kid in the 1960’s but mostly began to take notice of them when I moved to California and lived along the SP lines in northern California.
As for today, to some degree, my feelings are like Liz Allen, “it’s all crap now”. Trains these days do not look like they did back in the 70’s and 80’s, they are all patched and often have graffiti and things have changed a lot. However, there is a certain amount of drama so even these days I still like to watch trains go by.
Growing up on long Island in the early 70’s, all I saw were LIRR passenger trains. When i would venture out to Sunnyside Yard in Queens, NY, I would see more passenger trains and some freight trains sitting there. When traveling on family vacations, I would see both freight and passenger. Now, I see, as others do, mostly intermodal and tank trains, along with auto racks. In NJ, where I now live, I can watch on YouTube a live feed from CSX CP10 and see it many dedicated trains as well as mixed freight with lots of colorful (and dirty) freight cars of all types. On my model railroad layout, the box cars are from various railroads, very colorful, and I enjoy it as do others when we run trains.
Neal
When my best friend Bill and I would watch trains on the C&NW in the mid 1960s one of our favorite games was “this car could have been pulled by steam.” There were still wood single sheathed box cars in use back then, and locally a tannery got its hides in them. The early built dates intrigued us. There were also still wood ice bunker reefers and now and then, a 2 bay “war emergency” hopper that had not had its wood sides replaced by steel. Most of those wood hoppers were CB&Q it seems to me. 8000 gallon riveted side tank cars were also still quite common.
Most freight cars seemed to be boxcars back then and when you’d see a long train, the differences in car height were amazing. And of course the 1960s also saw very large cars, auto parts boxcars, huge tank cars, and so on. The variety and the disparity between newest and oldest was astounding.
I still enjoy seeing any kind of train but I do think the 1960s saw the most interesting blend of modern era large capacity cars with cars dating back to the wood car/early steel era and everything in between.
Dave Nelson
Now I understand what I was feeling all these years when watching the real trains. I just couldn’t pinpoint what it was, or put it into words. But basically most of you just did that. Thank-you. Although, I feel sad about it as it’s the way of the future.
Oh, and someone mentioned graffiti on autoracks and hoppers. That’s about the only cheerful thing I look forward seeing when a train passes by nowadays. To me, graffiti break up the monotony of colours (lack thereof) and shapes and bring a temporary disruption.
Lastly, I hate to say it, but watching the vehicles on the highway seems more interesting than watching trains on the railroad, if we consider the variety in appearance (I just drove back from the LHS and was stuck on the highway for an hour, go figure).
Really? It appears we’re awash with a whole lot of cars that look the same and are painted silver.
Why, when I was a lad, things were MUCH better:
Tailfins and swoopy’s all over the place. Why the '59 Chevy could slice off an arm. And probably did. And then there were TWO-TONE cars! And real fake wood on things called station wagons. Giant glass windows. White wall tires.
You kids, today. You don’t know what you missed.
Ed
Station wagons are still around. They just renamed them SUVs. [(-D]
CG
“Crossovers” are station wagons in everything but name.
I can see busy tracks from my office window and I think people are dismissive of the variety of equipment and road names that are out there. Even a stack train could have eight or nine different types of rolling stock and dozens of container owners.
Cars all look the same these days and I suppose to some extent you could say the same about trains.
I didn’t see steam engines as a kid - they were before my time - but I knew what they were, from photos, films, and model trains. I could appreciate them intrinisically without experiencing them firsthand. It is possible that a kid could be interested by the variety seen in model trains moreso than in contemporary real-world freight trains, especially when they are nothing but strings of shipping containers (as they are in my region).
A lot of the “things are all the same” discussion really means people aren’t familiar with the differences so don’t see them or don’t bother to learn the differences.
The transisition era was all 40 ft boxcars and twin hoppers until people started learning the difference between the various car types (a PRR X29 is not the same as a USRA steel boxcar).
People tell me the 1880-1910 era cars are “all the same”, but there is a huge variety of cars. If you know what to look for and actually take the time to look for them.
Regarding boxcars, one thing that was interesting back in the day was seeing the various railroads’ slogans sprawled across the cars - “The Route of Phoebe Snow,” “Way of the Zephyrs,” “The Peoria Gateway,” “The Silver Meteor,” etc. The slogans seemed to suggest a magical world waiting to be explored.