I see a lot of tank cars at my favorite train watching spot. Most of them have vertical, yellow stripes on the side of the tank. They have two relatively long strips at each end of the tank, with several shorter stripes in between the ends of the tank. What do these strips signify?
They’re just reflective stripes intended to make it easier to see that black tank when approaching a grade crossing in the dark. Too many people running into the side of a train at night at crossbuck only crossings…
Safety at RR crossings at night. The stripes should be reflectorized so that your headlights make the the otherwise dark train visible. This is especially helpful at private road crossing that do not have flashing warning lights.
Think of those like the red and white markings on an OTR truck that are required so people maybe don’t run into them in the middle of the night. I still laugh at the one lawyer that tried to sue my boss in 2015 when his client hit one of our trucks in the rear end. He hit a Polished stainless steel tanker that was lit up with LED’s full red and white stripes and on a clear night. Then it came out after discovery his client was driving on a suspended license for his 3rd DUI at the time but still thought my boss should pay for his accident. We got that case dismissed with a summary judgement.
The polished stainless rear ends of trucks can be blinding when following and ones headlights happen to strike the polished surface at the right angle.
If it’s a really big yellow stripe, top to bottom, it’s a sulphur car.
I’ve seen the yellow reflective stripes oriented vertically and horizontally.
https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/CFR-2010-title49-vol4/pdf/CFR-2010-title49-vol4-part224.pdf
More than you ever wanted to read about reflective railcar striping. Even has pictures!
FRA rules dictate square footage of reflective material, color and rough placement. The rest is the call of the railroad or home shop.
(The FRA rules are guided by Volpe Center Research, but the rules tend to be different in scope and detail.)
We just had two fatals into the sides of moving trains here. (including one with flashers bells & gates) …All the reflective material in the world isn’t going to stop some of this.
Today I paid closer attention to a passing BNSF freight train. It had tank cars, box cars, grain cars, etc. All of them had the yellow stripes. They were positioned on the tank cars as per above. On the box cars they were vertical; on the grain cars some of them were vertical and some of them were horizontal; on the flat cars they were horizontal.
Some of the stripes appeared to be new. Is having the stripes on all the cars a recent requirement?
Yes it is a DOT requirement I believe because some drivers were driving into stopped trains on railroad crossings that were poorly illuminated. The stripes are on locomotives as well but some it is blended into the paint scheme so for a UP locomotive, the stripe is yellow reflective and is along and just under the walkway platform. On the UP 4141 it is a white reflective strip to blend in more with the paint scheme of that unit.
To your earlier question on the varying legnths and verticle placement I think with tank cars they wanted to convey visually the end and beginning of the car for some reason (switching when it is the last car in the train?). Hence at the ends the vertical stripes are longer then in the center.
Not sure why they vary on other cars.
Remember the incident a few years ago where a car ran under a tank car blocking a crossing that the gates were not working ?
It appears the requirement came about ca 2007. A table in the linked copy of the federal reg showed stepped completion requirements from 2007 to 2015.
Keeping the reflectorized markings within reg will require replacement of the stripes from time to time. And there’s always new cars…
Yesterday I saw several cars where the reflective stripes had been applied over the graffiti. I am not sure how long graffiti lasts, but it looked relatively new. All is not lost, however. On one of the cars it appeared that the taggers had worked around one of the stripes.
Graffiti usually lasts until the car is repainted, which could be never.
Some taggers seem to have figured out that if they paint around the reflective striping, numbers, and other writing the railroad will be unlikely to ‘touch up’ the car, so their work will be left alone for longer.
The car department probably has a figurative back pocket full of those stripes, so if they see one missing or otherwise rendered not reflective, they can replace it.
Requirements for yellow reflective markings were introduced in 2005 with deadlines for implementation by 2013 (Canada) and 2015 (USA).
Canada had some older reflective marking requirements dating back to the 1970s for white reflective markings (4" circles or diamonds) and if you look carefully at older photos of Canadian rail cars you can see the white reflective dots along the car - or on older cars in service post-2005, you can pick out the modern, highly visible yellow striping, and also the older white dots.
This car built in 1979 and still in older paint, is a virtual cornucopia of car markings:
http://canadianfreightcargallery.ca/cgi-bin/image.pl?i=prox98970&o=procor
You can make out the post-2005 yellow reflective striping, and below that, along the lower portion of the tank body, the older white reflective dots. The “spreadsheet” style tank qualification data table above the right truck is a post-1998 tank car data stencilling requirement. The horizontal orange painted band was a short-lived Canadian requirement from the 1980s to identify hazardous materials gas in compressed or liquified gas service. You can also see the classic post