January 24, 2012

From Daylight to Warbonnets

A lot of railfans love the locomotives.  They like being able to look at these huge pieces of machinery and be able to rattle off statistics about how much horsepower it has, or how much it can pull, or how many of them there are, or whatever.  And who can blame 'em?  One of the (few) things I appreciate about diesels is that the railroads realized that they could be painted in company colors... and so they were.  And what colors!  Everywhere you went, the most boring of engines could be made interesting by the various liveries.  For example, as a young duckling here in Northern Illinois, one of the most common railroad lines to see was the Chicago Central, a junior member of the Illinois Central company.  They ran from Chicago to Iowa with a spur going north to Albert Lea, MN... a more boring trackmap would be difficult to find.  But then you saw the locomotives.

Cardinal and White, and they look glorious.  I don't even know if the company is around anymore or if they were om nom nommed by CN when they took the Illinois Central, but I still remember the plain but beautiful look of the engines.

But that's just the tip of the iceberg.  Let's take a look at some of the better known and beautiful liveries throughout rail history, shall we?


Southern Pacific "Daylight"

EMD E9A
Southern Pacific's freight livery was known as the "bloody nose", for its rather plain dark gray body with a red nose.  Their elite passenger lines were known as the "Daylight", such as the Coast Daylight running from San Francisco to Los Angeles.  The Daylight livery has been called "the most beautiful train in the world," and it's hard to disagree. 

Delaware & Hudson "Lightning"

Baldwin RF-16 "Sharknose"
Unlike the Daylight scheme, which was only used on a few of SP's trains, the "Lightning" livery was used on all of the Delaware & Hudson's engines.  Blue over silver, with the yellow striping that gives the scheme its name?  I've never seen a D&H engine in the flesh, and since it was glommed by Canadian Pacific in 1991, I probably never will... but there's no railroad livery I'd rather look at.  It's just about perfect.

Union Pacific "Armour"

GE GTEL "Big Blow"
Sure, it's rather... plain.  However, Union Pacific is the largest rail company in the US, and has been for quite some time.  If you live west of, say, Cleveland, it's pretty much even money that any particular train you see will be pulled by a UP engine... with the odds getting shorter the farther west you go.  Because of this fact alone, UP's "Armour Yellow" scheme, in which pretty much all of their engines are adorned, deserves a spot on this list of great liveries.  Oh, the name?  Well, when UP started using it, they discovered that it was pretty much the same shade of yellow that the Armour meatpacking company used...

Atchison, Topeka & Santa Fe "Warbonnet"

EMD F7A
To people of a certain age, this is the paint scheme of American railroading.  It's one of those liveries that has become iconic: the Yankees' "NY."  The Dallas Cowboys' blue star.  That sort of thing.  It's easy to understand why, too: just look at it.  That at its heyday it was a competitor (size-wise) with the Union Pacific surely helped as well.  Ironically, the Santa Fe's main line never ran to the state capital of New Mexico.

Chicago, Burlington & Quincy "Zephyr"

EMD E5
Sometimes the best look is the simplest.  The Burlington's Zephyrs were the fastest passenger trains of their day, and were the first successful "streamliners" to boot.  To play off this futuristic look, they were almost completely unpainted stainless steel and chrome.  A more legendary livery would be hard to find in the US.  You can still see the Nebraska Zephyr running at the Illinois Railway Museum, being powered by the world's last EMD E5 diesel engine.

I'm sure there are dozens of others out there that one could call legendary.  Got a favorite I didn't mention?  Tell me about it in the comments!

Posted by: Wonderduck at 11:10 PM | Comments (3) | Add Comment
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1 Chicago Central as a company still exists under the Grand Trunk holding company

I wouldn't call it legendary, but I still fondly remember Chessie System's colors from when I was growing up.

Posted by: JP Gibb at January 25, 2012 07:47 AM (VSD03)

2 I didn't get to see too many trains growing up in the middle of Los Angeles, but every time we went out to the desert or into the Sierras we'd see trains and I'd be pressed up against the window of the car counting cars, checking out the locos, etc. I remember seeing lots of Santa Fe, Union Pacific, and Southern Pacific locos going through Mojave and up either side of the Sierras.

In my board game heydays, my gaming group like to play the railroad games like Empire Builder, 1830, 1856, etc.  It was amusing a while back when I was talking to a train fanatic, and I knew more about which lines ran to what cities and what kinds of loads they would deliver than he did.  Of course I wasn't anywhere near his league on the trains themselves.

Posted by: David at January 25, 2012 11:41 AM (+yn5x)

3 Most of the rail lines had someone in the art department at either GM or ALCO create their livery in the early days of diesel.  The "Warbonnet" scheme even has a US Patent (which is odd, since as a paint scheme you'd think it'd be a copyright), but the patent holder was a GM employee.

Posted by: Ranger Rick at January 28, 2012 01:19 AM (wQTBU)

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