Model Forum / General / Railroads / February 2010

Google is your friend, especially if you're willing to try different
search phrases, eg "freight car gallery", "CPR freight car paint
schemes", etc. But it's not easy. The top hits tend to be sites selling
you models, not sites providing data. Also, most photos are of engines
(are you surprised?), not freight cars. Try these sites as a starting point:

http://www.cwrr.com/nmra/Photoa-NZ.html

http://abpr2.railfan.net/

There is indeed a lot more colour now than there used to be, and you're
out by about 10 years in your memory of freight car brown trains. The
trend to colour was well underway when in 1968 Canadian Pacific
introduced its MultiMark livery, with bright red, bright green, bright
yellow and of course shiny black, silver, and grey cars. Lots of short
lines bought cars and rented them out or let the demurrage roll in. They
used lots of different colours, too. Mechanical refrigerator cars
expanded the yellow and orange palette of the older brine-cooled
reefers. Railbox cars were bright yellow. And so on.

Of course what's available from some manufacturers doesn't represent the
relative proportions of different colours in the freight car fleet, but
by about 1970 most freight cars were not freight car brown any more.

Now in the 1950s most cars were some variation of the freight car red
theme, with reefers mostly orange or yellow, tank cars almost uniformly
black, and the brightest colours usually found at the end of the train,
unless a spiffy new diesel was on the point. Then you could admire one
og GMD's "custom" variations on their elegant theme, if the road hadn't
specified a home-gromw paint job.

   Colors other than boxcar, Tuscan or oxide red have been in use for a
number of decades, though it has become more widespread in recent
decades admittedly. Reefers have always been very colorful, mostly
bright yellow or orange.
   Santa Fe was painting some boxcars a bright red in the late '50s,
similar to their cabooses. In the '60s you had NYC boxcars painted jade
green, GN boxcars in their orange and green "pumpkin" scheme, and CNW
with some boxcars in green and yellow, as just a few examples.
   By the '70s GN had switched to their Big Sky Blue paint scheme, and
we were beginning to see some of the rental fleets like Railbox in more
colorful paint schemes. But boxcar, Tuscan or oxide red still dominated.
It's up to you to decide how much of a mix you want in your own fleet.

By the mid-70s there were a lot of colorful cars - especially boxcars.
The "railbox" boom spawned a lot of cars blue, yellow, green red, etc.
exterior post 50' boxcars not seen before. If my corner of the world
(Midwest US) was an indication, the explosion happened very quickly
after the first Railbox car appeared.  

Now granted, I grew up near a major paper mill city (Green Bay) so the
demand for new cars was probably higher than some other places... but
the "freight car rainbow" was well in place by '76 or '77 based on all
the equipment I saw at that time.