What is the general feeling of a museum taking, for example, a boxcar or passenger car, and lettering one side for an original company, and then lettering the other side for a successor company? Or perhaps an early logo on one side and later logo on the other?


Are there any examples of this currently done?

Thanks!

Matt Bumgarner
Alexander Chapter-NRHS

Personally i think its a great idea. My UP caboose 2516 has the pre 29 font style on one side and one end and post 29 on the other side and end, i like looking at both sides and people seem to enjoy learning that UP had two styles.
Car 57 will have Colorado and Southern on one side and probably Denver Texas and Fort Worth on the other or UPD&G undecided yet.
The new UP caboose we are picking up will be yellow so different again.

Mike Pannell
High Plains RR Pres

There is a former B&O caboose in Clearbrook Park, in Clearbrook, Va. (just north of Winchester). It's a former B&O I-1 that has had its cupola removed, likely by the B&O when it was refitted for local service. It was later sold to local shortline Winchester & Western, and is now preserved in the park. It's lettered for B&O on one side, and W&W on the other.

https://cedarmeadestudios.com/tag/caboose/

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I understand that the Colorado Museum has painted opposite sides of several cars in different paint or lettering schemes. Often with a matching end so that a 3/4 view will show the correct lettering.

Relatively recently (within the last few years) the Museum repainted a refrigerator car that was once owned by the C&S and then the RGS with one side and end for each of the railroads.

DM&IR 604/Union 304, the 0-10-2 on display in Greenville, PA is lettered for both roads, one on each side. The same is true for Pennsylvania 9684/Waynesburg & Washington 4, the narrow gauge 2-6-0 in Waynesburg, PA (or at least it was last time I was out there a few years back).

It depends on the mission of the organization. But you said "museum". It could be argued that
a museum's job is conservation. When an artifact is "restored" the museum definition is to
accurately return an object to a known or presumed previous condition. By lettering it for
two different companies, where such a dual lettering scheme never would have existed during
the object's lifetime, it is restoring it to a fictitious previous condition.

Pacific Electric interurban car 435 is preserved at Travel Town in Griffith Park (Los Angeles CA). In its last few years as LAMTA 1543, it was repainted in the MTA two tone green paint job that was applied to many of their narrow-gauge PCC streetcars, but only to this one interurban car. At last report, one side and one end are still in the MTA colors, while the opposite side and end are PE red, which in a photo on the Preserved North American Electric Railway Cars website, is rather faded.

I saw this done by an airline circa 1991 !

Northwest was trying out some new paint schemes and took 4 DC9s and tested 8 of them !!!

and didn't Pacific Fruit Express (at one point in time) put one railroads logo on one side and the other on the other ???

Bob H

I know a guy who has an ex-GN Ranch car who painted one side in Omaha orange and Pullman green, and the other side Big Sky blue.

As the saying goes - you can't see both sides at the same time, so why not?

Hi,

The Colorado Railroad Museum started as a private collection (Bob Richardson and someone else - Hauck?) in Alamosa Colorado. The business was a hotel.

Several pieces of equipment have two paint schemes.

The one I remember is F&CC Box Car 588 and Montana Southern ???. MS purchased much of the F&CC rolling stock when the F&CC folded.

The CRRM has been continuing this practice in several places.

I think one end and one side of a car for one railroad and the second end and side for another is a good way to show the history of the car itself showing two of its owners.

Doug vV

Erie Lackawanna had a Baldwin road switcher in two different schemes for a short while. It had been in the shop for work, and was being converted from the earlier Black / Yellow scheme to the Gray / Maroon / Yellow scheme. Only one side was painted before it was urgently needed for a train. (I don't know how long it lasted, like this)

JR

Doesn't the IL Ry. Museum's ex-CB&Q switcher have slightly different versions of the same paint scheme on either side of it?

I have suggested to Virginia Museum of Transportation Executive Director Bev Fitzpatrick that if and when the former RF&P E8 is restored, that one side wear the Richmond, Fredricksburg & Potomac - and Norfolk and Western on the other. When N&W sidelined the Class Js and replaced them on passenger trains with leased E8s from RF&P and Atlantic Coast Line they were not repainted, only re-lettered for N&W. Another option would be to use a magnetic strip with N&W to temporarily change the livery.

It could just as equally be argued that 'preservation' involves protection of the original fabric to the greatest extent possible -- e.g., with a proper coat of paint -- with comparatively less emphasis on the outside color and lettering of the protective membrane. It's been remarked often in these threads that temporary repainting of equipment for tours and other 'expedient' purposes is the least objectionable departure from full 'historic preservation' of the artifact in a known and documented state. It might also be noted that from particular sightlines, the artifact is fully restored to its historic state as far as a viewer might be concerned (this made me think momentarily of Heinlein's Fair Witness saying 'it's white on this side', though)

Likewise, if the object of a museum is to educate or inform the public about history, it would be necessary to have, and restore, and maintain, two separate cars to do the work of one with alternate sides painted differently. I, for one, would argue that this would be a wretched diversion of funds far better used elsewhere, for comparatively small value to a comparatively small number of people who would have to be both historically interested and sufficiently 'purist'. There's also some benefit for casual museum viewers to see alternative paint schemes by 'walking around' (presuming of course that both sides of the 'exhibit' can be accessed for viewing!)

I also wonder if the broad category of 'informative exhibits' that involve cutaways or other modifications of 'historic fabric' for better effect as displays or teaching tools are just as muchy a technical 'departure from historic state'.

This all presumes, of course, that (1) the full details of the historic paint scheme, colors, etc. are adequately and correctly preserved, so that at any time the artifact could (if wanted) be restored to a fully correct historic state; and (2) that any existing historic fabric (e.g. old paint layers, lettering, decals, etc.) is not destroyed (e.g., is properly encapsulated under the finish painting) or is effectively preserved for analysis before any painting-over, especially a weatherproof etching-primer epoxy job, is done.

I have no hesitation in noting that the unit should be fully restored for RF&P and the N&W 'patching' done either with magnetic strips or by being printed and applied with 'wrap' material as used for advertising on buses and commercial vehicles. That is also fully in keeping with the point made above about 'preserving the historic state' of an artifact as fully as possible before any "teaching" modifications (or compromises!) are made to it...

Playing devil's advocate for a moment: I remember the sojourn of the two 'skeletal' E-units in the yard adjacent to VMT a few years ago (it's almost decades now!). At the time I thought the 'restoration' of these units should involve nothing more than sheet Lexan or similar relatively unbreakable material, perhaps with the interior accoutrements of one of them color-coded and labeled (with Preston Cook's assistance) so that anyone viewing it could see at a glance what all the different components in situ did, and how the physical systems were arranged. You could then apply wrap (or some forms of paint) to the clear material, either at 'phantom' transparency or fully opaque, if the units needed to be displayed in an original or optional livery. Given that a reasonable number of fully-original or restored late E units survive in preservation, it made sense to me at least to use an already-skeletonized pair of units in this way (even though no E unit to my knowledge ran with plastic side sheathing) as both the benefits and the likely museumgoer's amazement and then interest would be beneficial to a museum's mission and bottom line. (If done reasonably right, it would also be possible to remove plastic paneling and substitute either 'original' or replica panels to restore the units completely...)

Yes, I would make at least one of the pair 'operable', and yes, I'd at least think about running excursions with them in that state. And yes, it would become interesting (in the old Chinese sense of the term) when both the obsessive wing of the foamer community and the full-historical-accuracy bigots found common cause for "complaint"... I'd be ducking for cover...