I had the following passed on to me by a 3rd party to see if I could find an answer. Any help appreciated.
"I’m trying to track down the origin of the Milwaukee Road’s pre-UP color scheme.
Maroon and orange is an odd combination. I don’t know how the MILW
colors vs Virginia Tech colors would compare on a modern Pantone
chart. Tech’s is Chicago maroon, however.
Tradition says that VPI picked to colors because no one else had
claimed the color scheme for football uniforms. That’s too folkloric
for me. On the other hand, how the colors of a Midwest railroad
would come to an agricultural and mechanical college in far rustic
Virginia, is not clear. (If local railroads were influential, I’d
expect N&W’s Tuscan red.)
So I wonder if there were some common ancestral event or person that
inspired the college and the railroad each to embrace those colors.??"
The orange and maroon paint goes back to at least the 1927 Pioneer Limited, and possibly before then I have never read of any reference to college team colors as an influence (I believe the Monon’s colors were college team influenced as an example). The Milw Rd did many things its own way including freight and passenger car design and construction. A possible origin for unusual and striking colors was the electric interurban railroads in the Chicago area, at least one of which directly competed with the Milwaukee Rd for passenger traffic
Considering that the VPI football team’s first colors were black and grey, any color would have been an improvement. The team complained that those original colored uniforms looked like prison uniforms.
It was VPI when I went there (before the “&SU” and before being known as just “Virginia Tech”). I was a railfan and a model railroader familiar with the Milwaukee Road before I went to VPI. I have never heard of any connection between these color combinations before reading this inquiry. As noted in the initial post, the colors of the two are not the same, and without documentation or evidence this “connection” would have to fall in the category of pure conjecture. Absent specific evidence, I think that the maxim from the social sciences would apply: “Correlation does not equal causation”.
At this point, I expect someone is considering a comment about how certain former Virginia Tech quarterbacks looked in prison uniforms…[:D]
I doubt there’s any connection to the colors of the Milwaukee and any colleges.
Passenger cars in the 19th century, before Pullman green became standard, were often fairly bright. Yellow (more a straw yellow rather than reefer yellow) was common, as was white (several roads had a “White Mail” train of white or cream cars). I suspect the Milwaukee may well have had orange passenger cars that far back.
FWIW some railroad paint schemes have indeed been adopted from local colleges. The Monon used the colors of both Indiana U. (red and white) and Purdue (black and gold) at different time. BTW Purdue sports teams are called the “Boilermakers” because back when they didn’t check student IDs too closely, Purdue used to hire local railroad shopmen to play on their football team.
Although an MR columnist claims the DM&IR maroon color came from the red iron ore it hauled, I’m pretty sure the Missabe maroon and gold are based on the U of Minnesota Golden Gopher’s colors (which are also the colors the UMD (Univ. of Minnesota - Duluth) Bulldogs).
I believe the Soo Line’s maroon and gold came from a different source (redwood passenger cars that the Wisconsin Central used at the time the Soo took them over) but since they were headquartered in Minneapolis the U of MN colors might have had an effect.
p.s. Remember that many railroads didn’t have their own colors until the diesel era. Paint schemes were pretty standard: engines were black, perhaps with tuscan roofs, freight cars were tuscan red or black, cabooses were red, and passenger cars were Pullman green. The concept of a railroad having an “identity” thru unique colors didn’t come along until the streamliner / diesel era.
The few steam colors were interesting. For example, Milwaukee’s orange/gray Hiawathas, SP 'Daylight" steam, and Great Northern’s ‘Glacier’ green steam engines.
It’s interesting (to me anyway) that in Britain steam engines normally were fully painted - that is, the boiler and tender would be LMS maroon or Great Western green. In the US black was most common, however more engines than you might think had gray or light green boilers - not just GN but NP, SP, DMIR, CB&Q I think(??) 19th century had boilers covered in Prussian (or “Russian”) Iron which apparently was light green (or light blue, depending on who you ask) and some later locomotives were painted to match that look.
Rumor has it (and heard/read from several sources) that the M$StL went to the Red and White, or should that be Crimson and Cream, scheme because the railroad’s president at the time was a Univeristy of Nebraska alum and thought
