I’m putting bumpers on the ends of my spur tracks, partly for looks and partly for safety. Some of my spurs lead off the edge of the table, and over running the spur could dump rolling stock on the floor.
The instructions that came with the bumper kit suggest painting the finished bumper safety yellow or red and white, to make the bumper easily visible to train crews.
Is this right? I don’t remember ever seeing a bumper as anything other than plain old rust colored. Or tie brown for the bumpers made from piles of old ties.
Most of the brightly painted ones have been on industrial tracks, mostly yellow. I have seen black and aluminum in yards.
I would paint the ones on railroad owned tracks “standard” color, like the same color you would paint guardrails or lamp posts or bridges.
The ones on industry tracks could be yellow or aluminum or white or whatever color you want, but they can be a mix of the colors, whatever the company wants.
Most that I’ve seen tend to be rusty. Dave H.'s comments about where he’s seen painted ones correlate with my memory. They’re usually not done by a railroad, rather are part of an industrial safety program gone perhaps a bit overboard. Most that I’ve seen on-line vs on an industry track are rust-covered, but I suspect they were originally black if they were ever painted.
It might also depend on your era. In the “classic” era it seems that they were all black (or originally black and then heavily weathered). Some modern ones are more bright. About ten (or so) years ago the ADM plant in Lincoln, NE added a lot of track capacity - each of the ten tracks has a bright yellow bumper and they are still very yellow!
I usually paint mine either rust-red or flat black, and then weather them to make the paint non-uniform. But, I model the Transition Era.
This coloring makes them blend in pretty well with the surroundings. For the modern era, I would think that weathered safety yellow would look good. Another thing I’ve done with a few of them is paint a black and yellow diagonal striped pattern on the pad, while leaving the rest black.
Mine are just rusty colored, but I should admit I did not do an eshaustive study of period historic sources. These are supposed to be on trackage owned by the waterfront switching railroad in nthe middle 1950s in Texas.
I prefer to paint mine yellow with a bit of rust dry brushed on.I do this for several reasons one of which is My Z scale layout goes to shows about 4 times a year and I want people to notice the little details.
I use yellow on my home N scale layout because I like the colour contrast to the surrounding scenery.If I ever get my HO layout built (got about 6 months of cleaning first) it will also use yellow track bumpers.[:)]
My prototype favored Oxide Red, so that’s the color I’ll use when I install the ones I have.
The ones currently in use where the sun will never shine bear a strong resemblance to headless steel nails - probably because they are. There are also a couple of small pieces of steel angle iron…
This is what I have read on the subject. That starting some time in the 1980’s it became common to paint bumpers that were near where vehicles would drive near, would be painted a color so as to be noticed. Yellow seems to be the predominate color used.
The ones at track ends where this is not an occurrence seemed to be just black or rust.
In my subways, I’ve got a pair of tracks that end in a station. Since it’s hard to see what’s going on, I took a look at the ends of the subway cars and installed a piece of soft foam on the end walls, so that any train coming in too fast would hit the foam at a point on the car where there are no details or couplers to be damaged by the impact. As a side note, I installed magnetic reed switches as sensors and magnets on the floor of the cars so that I can tell when the train gets to the end of the siding, using LEDs on the control panel.
