To add to what Stix said I will add this… I’ve seen cars with RBLT 10/90 then the location of the shop that rebuilt the car.I’ve see REBLT 5/88 UTLX Marion.
Anyone have photos of these markings?
That is correct. Very few short lines or leasing companies care about what logos are on the car side anymore. They apply new initial and numbers to the sides, end, center sill and truck bolsters. Usually just a cheap patch job. Sometimes when the cars go to shop for a major overhaul they may go through a repaint, but that is not the norm.
Probably most freight cars that have been around for a while will have that on it. In recent years it could represent a company, on many cars it would represent the city the railroad’s shops are located that did the work. It’s usually 3-4 letters, like “CHI” for Chicago, “MPLS” for Minneapolis, “LA” for Los Angeles etc.
So…probably the majority of freight car pictures around show cars that have the lettering on it; but, it’s only like 1-2" high lettering toward the lower part of the car, so unless someone specifically took a picture of just that part of the car, it would be hard to read in a typical picture.
p.s. if you check model box cars, reefers etc. you’ll probably find quite a few showing that lettering.
I used to see a jade green NYC coil car in captive duty (or bought second hand and never repainted at all, given that it wasn’t leaving the property any time soon) at a steel mill in Western PA well past 2000. Haven’t seen it in about six years. Maybe it disintegrated in a puff of rust-dust in a hard coupling.
Keep in mind a merger or purchase of one railroad by another is different than a railroad selling a car to another railroad. For example when Burlington Northern was created by merger in 1970, it not only owned it’s own “BN” reporting marks, but also the reporting marks of the railroads that merged to create BN, like Great Northern (GN) and Northern Pacific (NP). There was no requirement that a GN car be relettered for BN; in fact, a few late sixties GN ‘big sky blue’ boxcars continued in regular service with original paint and “GN” reporting marks into the early 1990’s.
In recent decades, it’s even happened that a railroad has bought new cars but had them delivered using reporting marks from a prior railroad, one that maybe had merged out of existence 20 or 30 years ago. Around 1990 Chicago & NorthWestern bought some new coal cars that came lettered for CMO (Chicago St.Paul Minneapolis & Omaha) and MSTL (Minneapolis & St.Louis), railroads that hadn’t existed since 1960 or earlier.