The other evening I was driving home from work across an overpass of the CP tracks near my house in Milwaukee. There was a mixed-freight train stopped for the airport Amtrak station. It was dark, and I noticed a car with greenish-blue lights on the top corners. It was a large box, but I couldn’t tell if it was a boxcar, a reefer, a container, or some other type. It appeared to be white. It looked oversized because it stood taller than the cars next to it. I’ve never seen a car like it, and was wondering what it could be.
Oh-oh, you’ve seen one of ‘those’ boxcars. Start looking over your shoulder…
//running gag on this forum, in case you didn’t know
I would imagine either a container with its own heating/cooling unit.
If it was a generator for other containers, I don’t think it’s allowed to be on top. So I would say the above.
Some of the refrigeration units on the newer mechanical refrigerator cars have panels that light up in that phosphorescent green color; there may be other lights to indicate that the thing’s running, and the temperature is usually given toward the bottom of the car in a red digital display. So though I don’t know exactly what you saw, I’ll bet on a newer mechanical reefer.
And yes, odds are that it was white!
They would be reefers. I have seen two of them in daylight and dark parked on the WSOR siding just south of the I-43 overpass. No doubt in my mind that the green lights are to indicate that the refrigerator unit is running properly. Reporting marks something like ARM? I forget.
ARMN.
Or BNSF, TILX, CEFX, CRYX, maybe a few others.
someone is sticking those cheap flashing LED lights on the potash hoppers that come through here.
Totaly random on the side of the hoppers.
I`ll bet it looks nice at night,rolling through the tooley-boonies.
Kurt.
Could be an air repeater car:
The repeater air car is utilized to increase efficiency of train air brakes on long trains and during cold weather. The purpose of repeater relay equipment is to accept pneumatic signals from the brake pipe of forward portion of a train, and by relay action, produce a corresponding response in the brake pipe of the rear section of the train. The repeater relay car has the ability to produce faster train charging time, reduce or eliminate brake pipe pressure gradient, more uniform braking forces, and faster brake application and release times.
It looked like the ARMN reefers I’d seen before, but I’d never seen one at night from an overpass. It was about 15 cars away and I was looking at it end-on, from above, while driving by. The lights were at the top corners on the end, and seemed fairly large. Are they sized/placed so they can be seen easily from a passing train or station from a distance, or from a yard tower? They would be nice to have on a model layout. Are there any other freight cars with similar lights on them?