So I was driving home from the gym tonight and I was privileged enough to be stopped at a grade crossing by the daily southbound freight train. Actually I saw the crossing gates flashing and couldnt help but to speed up the street to get a good view as it rolled by. Anyhow, I digress. So there I was watching this Union Pacific train go by and I realized that compared to how I would reproduce it on my work in progress of a layout, it was relatively drab and no cars really stood out from the rest.
Perhaps it is a testament to my fleet, but it seems like there are more of the neat, colorful and flashy cars available to us hobbyists. Don’t get me wrong, I like the occasional eye catching car, but I feel like in some cases it can be more of a challenge than it seems to create the right amount of monotony in one’s car fleet. I myself have worked on that and I feel like I have made some progress, but I still feel like it doesn’t quite have the prototypical feel. Weathering certainly helps, but as my non model railroader of a brother said to me once “I like all the trains, but they don’t really look real.There are too many blue, orange and green cars and not enough gray.” (There’s a point to this post… its coming!)
Since then I have worked on getting a more proper amount of railroad drab in my fleet, but it is still not without challenges. I have retired/stored some of the cars I got when I was younger and simply bought up random freight cars. My car fleet is small, many of you probably have or have owned more locomotives than I own rolling stock, so I feel like having a prototypical looking small fleet can be (or seems to be) more challenging than having a fleet of say 400 cars. So do any of you, no matter what size fleet you have find challenges in balancing it out with the right amount of mundane cars? What about building up a car fleet in general? I’m working on my new layout right now that’s bigger than my old one and part of the process is expanding t
I remember reading in a model railroad book - don’t ask me which one because it was so long ago - that you have to have lots of the same kind of car in the same paint scheme if you want your trains to look more like the real thing. This is especially the case if you are running long trains and / or if you have a large freight yard on your layout.
It also depends on the era, location, industries, and type of railway you are modeling. Cars were less colourful during the steam era - most box cars were brown. If you’re modeling the modern era and your railway hauls bulk commodities like coal, sulfur, potash, or cement, you’ll need a lot of hopper cars, and a good many of them will be grey - especially if they are owned by leasing companies.
I can see your point, and I think that the choice of prototype and locale would affect this to a large degree. For example, the D&RGW narrow gauge had only two paint schemes for their freight cars, really - boxcar red and black for the tank cars. Whereas a mainline railroad such as the AT&SF would have boxcars from dozens of connecting roads, and as such, all those varied paint schemes. It all comes down to what the prototype did. But as a modeler of the D&RGW, I find it relatively easy to get prototypical blandness into my fleet.
Yes, there certainly are a lot more “flashy” items available to modelers, but we don’t have to buy them. Over the past few years, I’ve bought black tankers, rust-red boxcars, dark green milk cars, black and rust-red flats and not much else.
If I look in my workshop in the drawer of paints, I see the same thing. Half a dozen browns - Earth Brown, Chocolate Brown and so on. The same for green. There’s only one blue, and one bright schoolbus yellow. (Well, what other color would I paint a schoolbus?)
And for those bright, flashy cars that somehow have made it into my fleet, well, there’s always weathering. Did I mention the colors in my weathering powder kit? Black. Rust red. Surprised?
Today’s trains can be pretty boring, especially a container train. My model fleet for the early 50’s probably is a little more colorful than it should be. But I’m not interested in modeling a drab world. I prefer to model the 50’s as I imperfectly remember them. So it’s a cleaner more colorful world. I can get all the reality I need just driving down the highway.
Which is why I do not model the modern railroads, engines look like bricks on a flatcar, cars are bland, and there are no cabin cars. I model the 60’s and 70’s, even the PC was more colorful than today’s railroads.
There is another aspect at work here. As a rule we modelers are trying to replicate long trains with very short trains, even in N scale. A 20 or 30 car freight train is considered quite long on most home model railroads and might well have three units at the point, and at even rather large layouts I operate on a ten car train is very very long, mostly due to the length of yard tracks and passing sidings. A boring consistency of color, or rather not color but “tone,” can make that train look longer. Put an isolated bright yellow or red car in the middle and suddenly you notice how short your train is because your eyes focus on how few cars there are between the standout and the power and the standout and the end of train/caboose. It kills an illusion.
The same is true of very large cars. A ten car train with just one 89 foot auto parts car in the middle looks shorter than if that 89 foot car was swapped out for one 40’ boxcar.
So even when there is a genuine prototype for very colorful cars (and that started well before the per diem boxcar era: in the 60s with UP’s yellow boxcars, NYC’s/PC’s jade green, Santa Fe’s bright red, GN’s sky blue, Rio Grande’s orange – trains were getting quite colorful) there is something to be said for toning down the color on the layout.
This is also why unit trains tend to look long on layouts, even if less than prototype length.
Not really…90% of the freight cars was Boxcar brown…After all those was the decaying years and was completely nasty especially East of the Mississippi.
I suggest you spend time track side…Its not as dull as you may think.
boy what a bunch of grumpy old folks here—[swg][:-,]
I look at what I see up here and I’m not that bored with what I see. All these auto carriers and such have all that weathering on them and the graffitti that dresses them up----(I know, I just brought in the molotov—[:O]—it is still vandalism).[:-^] The doublestacks with their multi coloured containers as well as he tanks and such—geeez louise.
I model the ‘70’s and 80’s on my layout—but I don’t do this just because I miss those times wherein the cars were more "colourful—like Larry I seem to recall there to be a LOT of boxcar brown 50’ boxes and such—not much colour there–[xx(]
I model the late '30s, but my personal memories are of the '50s. In those days, my hometown hosted four railways and most of the cars were either black or boxcar red - and that included the reefers and covered hoppers, too. However, there was a wide variety of roadnames from all over North America. My version of the '30s looks similar, although I do run more brightly-coloured reefers (suitably weathered, of course) than I ever recall seeing. My free-lanced “home roads” paint almost all of their rolling stock boxcar red (most house cars have black ends and roofs, though), with home road reefers and cabooses the only exceptions to the drab colour schemes.
Someone once asked why there was so much boxcar red to be seen in my posted “roll-bys”, and my answer was because that’s the way it was. As kids, standing in the back of the old man’s car when stuck at a crossing (I think he enjoyed it as much as we did)[;)], the sameness of the paint schemes mattered not one bit, as the variety of roadnames more than made up for the drabness of the paint.
As for developing a car fleet, I based the home roads’ equipment partially on the industries served and partially on my personal preferences. Like most modellers, I probably have more cars than I “need”, but home road cars of any type outnumber those of a similar type from any one particular interchange partner. On the other hand, the total number of most car types from “foreign” roads is greater than the same car types owned by the home road.
In operation, cars cycle off or on the railroad at interchange points (staging), so there’s always a changing variety of cars to be seen (even though they’re mostly all the same colour).[swg][(-D]
I model the mid 50’s in Pa and boxcar red, and black hoppers are the main colors. I do have some colorful cars, usually meat packing reefers, PFE, or misc. reefers. But they make up a small percentage of the overall fleet
There are advantages to modeling a railroad which was:
A government-owned national monopoly.
Not interested in using freight cars to create an ‘image.’
The result is that 90+ percent of my freight fleet consists of black cars with white reporting marks and stenciling (can’t say ‘lettering,’ most of it is kanji.) Of the rest, the colors follow function:
White - refrigerated/insulated cars.
Pastel green - 100kph-capable (a few container cars and one brake van.)
Sky blue - 120+kph capable (again, a few container cars with humongous axle bearing housings.)
Plus a very few in other colors - solid brown or solid orange - indicating captive service.
My private railway has 100% black cars, differentiated only by a small heraldic device over the car number.
OTOH, passenger trains range from ‘grunge maroon’ to a sharp-looking grey, cream and traction orange scheme (DMU) or sky blue (high speed sleepers.)
The overall effect isn’t colorful, it’s just that of a workaday transportation system going about the job of moving people and goods from where they are to where they’re going.
Same thing with engines.The real workhorses on most railroads were 2-8-0’s and 2-8-2’s, 0-6-0’s in the yards.
What manufacturers build are 2-8-8-8-2’s, 4-8-8-4’s, 4-4-4-4’s, Aero trains, all sorts of huge unique engines.
The reason is most modelers are at heart, collectors and not really trying to model a railroad. They want “cool” engines with a big wow factor (toys) rather than the typical, the commonplace, the actual. So every manufacturer makes one version of the USRA 0-6-0, the USRA 2-8-2 and some form of generic 2-8-0, meahwhile the oddball engines abound.
Interesting you should bring this up, I’ve been thinking about this very subject, albeit more about roadnames than colors…
I’ve purchased lots of my car fleet off of ebay from various sellers over the years. And while I most often look for lots that have cars with roadnames I’m interested in, or near my chosen road geographically, I was looking them over recently and realized that I’ve accumulated a quite-pleasing mixture of cars that feels “about right” to me in terms of diversity. Home road versus near roads versus far away roads and whatnot. And I also think that I’m getting close to having about the right mixture of cars also in terms of types of cars. I haven’t tried to compare mine to the “statistics” officially, but just judging from the “feel” of it, I’d say I’m getting there. And while I hadn’t thought about it much from a “color” standpoint until you brought it up, I think its in the ballpark there too.
I think everyone brought up some interesting commentary, especially about how era will partially help dictate the appropriate level of blandness or how monochromatic our cars should (or shouldn’t) look.
Dave,
I think this is what has been bothering me. It will be impossible for me to recreate prototypical length trains on my layout, and when a train is only 10 cars long at most everything does tend to stand out more. I had not really thought about this, although I was sort of leaning in this direction with the whole small fleet vs. large fleet thing. Just like in a large fleet a standout car in a long (say 25+ cars) model train wouldn’t stick out as much, assuming it belonged there.
From what I have read on this forum and experienced at my train store it seems like this is more of a trend with steam than it is with diesel. I suppose I can see why. There were a lot more types and classes of steam locomotives and since some roads made their own power, many classes existed on one one road. Fortunately for me I model the present day, and the part of the UP (SP) that I model just uses some GP38-2s and GP40-2s, all easy to find.