I often get to watch NS freights - both mixed manifests and intermodal - and RoadRailers go over a grade crossing of a busy street near here, and of course get to see the resulting antics from aggravation and road rage, etc. as the road vehicles wait impatiently.
So the current CSX “436 miles per gallon of fuel” TV and radio (NPR) ads and the recent NS ads got me to thinking:
Why don’t the railroads put some large slogans on their equipment to pacify the restless people waiting, and advertise and promote their service ?
Something like the following for a RoadRailer:
“Another truck NOT on YOUR highway !” or, “This truck is NOT on YOUR road !”
For freight cars - esp. boxes - it could be something like:
“This car is 4 trucks NOT on YOUR street !”
For locomotives, it could be: “Another trainload of freight NOT on your ROADS !”
The slogans ought to be installed up pretty high on the car, so that they are beyond the reach of the normal ground-based graffiti vandals.
Also, this might be hard to do on flats and well cars - not much of a billboard surface there to display the slogan largely - so maybe put it also on some railroad-owned containers instead.
Any reaction, pro or con ? Any other suggestions for slogans ?
Railroads in the past have done that. Just not in the same context. The UP for example, they had slogans on boxcars, locomotives, and other cars.
“Be Specific, Ship Union Pacific”
“Dependable Transportation”
“We Will Deliver(Eventually)”
I know that today those are a joke, but it is the same idea for a different context. Today people are worried about the trucks on the road but back when those slogans above were used, people were looking for an efficent, cost effective, reliable way to ship things.
I think it would be a great idea for the railroads to do that for todays market. It would be good PR for them, and maybe make the general public more pro rail shipping.
NS Kind of did that in that commercial where the tree picks the container up off the truck in the traffic jam and places it on a passing train.
The Roadrailer wouldnt work as it spends a portion of it’s time on the highway.
There is very little advertising on the sides of railcars. I have been told there are regulations against it…might have been from a railroader using it as an excuse to get rid of me. At most the maximum one can expect on the railcar sides is the name.
Grafitti will very quickly invade a car’s graphics, rendering the investment nearly worthless.
Railroads have been shy to advertise over the past several decades. One reason put forth concerning the sides of cars, etc., was that it opened them up for liabilities…silly reasons like people would be reading that instead of driving or people would know who to sue if needed. But, overall railroads never got the message that when they closed the local depot and the public thought they left town, they needed some kind of an advertising and public relations program if only for the upkeep of safety. Truck trailers have great amounts of advertising on their flanks, but rail management feel the cars spend so much time away from public view (yards, moving at speed, at night, in areas not seen by the publice, etc., ) so they have done nothing more than reporting marks and transit information.
I’d think that if each car owner did some advertising on their cars - and simple stuff is what you want (“Everywhere West”), then the average motorist waiting at a crossing would see several dozen messages over the course of a mixed manifest train.
Bring forward the themes of their television advertising would be fantastic, as has been mentioned.
And the advertising doesn’t have to tout the value of shipping by rail, it could be for the product (on a dedicated service car).
The other reasons given notwithstanding, the chief objection I can think of from the car owner point of view is just plain cost. Manhours and paint still cost money.
As far as point 2 goes- there are AAR restrictions on Selling advertising space on freight cars that go all the way back to the Great Depression and the era of Billboard reefers (beloved of model freight car collectors). According to a blurb in TRAINS magazine I read a few years ago, the rules came about when shippers started pitching a fit when a RR would deliver cars to their sidings with a competitor’s ad on them (Swift Meat receiving Armour billboard reefers for instance)…the rules do not prohibit a RR or other car owner from using their own corporate slogan as well as OPERATION LIFESAVER, etc. Recently, at least one advertising firm has pitched the idea again but only for captive service cars(i.e freight cars that are not interchanged but stay on the owner RR’s property). I’m not sure what became of it. Obv. Amtrak and some of the Mass Transit agencies are not bound by the Ad ban and have “billboarded” equipment in recent years.
I can still see where “Southern gives the green light to innovation” on the sides of boxcars, thanks to NS’s policy of slowly painting over SOU reporting marks. There might still be a couple of “Big Johns” still out there telling shippers they can ship more than the guy who doesn’t have one.
A phrase is all that is needed, ALA the old “Burma Shave” signs. Just think of the combinations that could come up after the cars got shuffled ,LOL. Might relieve some of the frustrations of some drivers. I gotta believe that if it could be done, someone would have done it already.
A unit-train operation - like coal hoppers - might work pretty well for that, although they do get shuffled from time to time.
Better yet would be an intermodal “car” with the usual 3 to 5 “platforms” or “wells” connected by drawbars that are almost never disconnected. that way, all the phrases woudl stay in the right order. The height of the sides would be about right, too, for lettering or stencilling a running gag like that along their length . . . [swg]
UP’s current paint scheme (applied too sparingly on older cars, IMHO) includes their “Building America” trademark, which certainly should pack as much punch as “Be Specific” ever did.
And the newest CSX intermodal containers include their “How Tomorrow Moves” trademark. Unless they paint it on something that isn’t a container, it would appear that Tomorrow won’t be moving with CSX railroad equipment, unfortunately.
A decade or so ago, CN had a goodly number of covered hoppers painted with a “Rail–the Environmental Mode” logo. Ahead of their time? Most of those cars have disappeared, faded, or been repainted by now.
I think I’ve said it before, but BNSF could resurrect the Q’s “Everywhere West” slogan–and mean it this time!