So on another recent thread we were talking about a GN hopper car and I had a model of it which featured a COTS stencil (is that even the correct erm?. Something like this picture I found:
Now I had heard (which could be incorrect) that these stencils were not added to cars until some time in the 70s, but my car is decorated for GN, so that would make much sense…
I model the year right around the BN merger (i.e. 1969-1971). So would it be correct for my era to have such a stencil on my cars.
Any other info about such stencils would be very helpful, as I really know very little! Information is a bit elusive on the internet right now!
A quick look at my photographs (or at least the slides I have scanned) did not show the original form of the stencil starting to show up until 1975/76. Only a small minority of the images were of use since most were focussed on locomotives and passenger trains. Of specific relevance to your question is an NP boxcar in March of 1975 at Port Union, Ontario, Canada, which did not have the stencil.
Thanks for the help thus far guys! My car has the three panel layout… which would put it in the 80s. Okay, that’s quite the inaccuracy… whatever, maybe someday I‘ll get around to changing the decals to not include a COTS stencil.
I must not this is a very good feature for identifying era of cars! Keep the good info coming!
Remember with few exceptions, nothing in railroading changes instantly. On merger day, all of the Burlington, Great Northern, Northern Pacific and, Spokane, Portland and Seattle locomotives and cars didn’t magically appear in Burlington Northern colors. Cars still painted for GN and NP went to scrap after Y2K or twenty years after the BN merger. There were lots of cars built before ACI labels came about that still did not have one when they were phased out. The same with the three phases of the COTS blocks and the U-1 wheel inspection dots, it takes time to get them on, and time to get them off. If COTS blocks were discontinued in 2016, it will be 2041 before they will get hard to find.
One more point on COTS and reweigh stenciling. They are two seperate items covering two seperate issues. COTS refers to cleaning and servicing air brake components and lubing wheel bearings while reweigh means just that, reweighing the car. Both items exist simultaneously but seperately, on the car sides. COTS may be going away but, reweigh will still be with us.
In Galesburg IL (a big Burlington town and similarly important to the BN and BNSF) I saw plenty of CB&Q, GN, and NP freight cars at the yard with COTS boxes obviously applied well after the merger. Sooner or later some of those cars were perhaps repainted or relettered BN and maybe even BNSF, but many probably rolled their last revenue miles using the old original reporting marks, but they still had to have the legally required markings. In fact Jeff Wilson’s Kalmbach book on freight cars used a photo of a green and orange GN painted boxcar to illustrate the various marks and features of a car including the COTS and the wheel inspection dots. By the time Jeff took that photo the car was BN property of course but still marked GN.
As someone once pointed out, a car with old paint and lettering makes just as much money for the stockholders.
So depending on era it is no “error” at all to have an old reporting mark showing new markings, because the reporting marks can live on. The acquiring railroad owns them. Sometimes old and no longer used railroad names remain as the techical “legal” operator of the track. People who collect RPO markings on envelopes know that phenomenon well.
I model the pre COTS era C&NW and MDC came out with a whole series of car kits of C&NW cars that include the stencils. Unless the heralds say "emplo
Southern and, Norfolk and Western merged in 1982 to form the current Norforlk Southern. There are still Southern boxcars proclaiming they “Give the Green Light to Innovations”, twenty seven years later. I saw boxcars in full Erie, not Erie-Lackawanna paint in 1984, down here in Texas, twenty four years after that marriage. It would be equally interesting to know what common carrier freight car lasted the longest in its original paint and reporting marks, but, I don’t have time to look for it!!
There’s a handful of covered hoppers out there with B&O Capitol Domes on them.
Just the other day, I saw a very old patched boxcar with a super faded “Delaware Lackawanna” showing through the grime. Not even sure how that one was possible?