Repainting the car, even painting over the original surface in expert detail, would be a loss. Rock Island made the point and it is worth noting. Either the car goes indoors, or a structure specifically built around and over it must be built. Of course, we're not refinishing a walnut cabinet Edison Talking Machine, but railroad car, and one which was unlikely to survive as long as it has. Even more reason to preserve it as it originally appears. Apparently no others still exist. The reefer is pretty unique, and therefore valuable to the whole railroad story in a way few others are.

I can see three different facets of this matter of advertising on railroad cars:

1) Cars owned by shippers who displayed their product advertising on the car sides.

2) Cars owned by railroad companies who displayed their railroad advertising on the car sides.

3) Cars owned by railroad companies who sold space on their cars sides to any advertisers who wanted to display their advertising on the car sides.

Item #1 has been explained as pertaining to refrigerator cars, and being outlawed in 1934 because it amounted to a rate rebate to the shipper.

Item #2 has been practiced since the beginning, and does not raise any legal objection.

Item #3 is something that I have heard of, but I have no credible documentation of if, and I wonder if it is true that it actually occurred. It seems to be correlated with the explanation that it was outlawed because shippers did not like to find their products being shipped cars that advertised their competitor’s products.

There's loads of documentation for this practice: photographs. I've been working on a file of just this sort of pasted ad on the sides of boxcars for some time, and while it's been a long, slow process, is bearing fruit.

Essentially, it was a 19th Century practice that died out in the first five years or so of the 20th. Literally, shippers would slap a paper ad onto the side of a boxcar, sometimes (often) with a wood frame around it to keep it in place. Sometimes, this would get out of hand: I have more than a couple of photos of a car side with the remnants of three or more ads on it.

WHY the practice died out is still a mystery; reading through 120 year old trade journals is a slow process! But right around 1900 you started seeing "POST NO BILLS" on the sides of newly painted cars, and the practice seems to have died out at the same time.

I don't host images online, so I don't have anything directly to share, but a quick search through the Library of Congress' online collection for pre-1910 yard photos will almost always find you one or two cars with pasters on them.

Ray,

Thanks for that information. It does confirm exactly what I was talking about when I asked earlier whether the refrigerator car of this thread was a “billboard car.” And it confirms that the practice I listed as item #3 did indeed exist.

Apparently, the general concept of “billboard car” had been blurred over the years to include my items #1 and 2 above as well as item #3. Most online discussion of the topic seems to have items #1-3 blended together.

It is interesting that you do not readily find the reason that the 1800s-era billboard cars were outlawed. I would be interested in your research if you ever publish it or can share it here.

sometimes cars like this would get loaded with a competitor's product, yet it advertised the non loaded product, they complained about it, so then advertising cars were done away with.

The advertising car may still be owned by the railroad with its railroad base marking, just their logo isnt on the advertising car.

Lead paint.

Jes' sayin'...........

You're supposed to lick the Popsicle, not the container!

That seems to be the explanation for outlawing the so-called billboard cars of the original era of pre-1900. An entirely different explanation apparently accounts for the outlawing of refer ads in 1934. That explanation is that the ads amounted to a rate rebate or discount, which must have been protested by shippers who did not advertise on the car sides, and therefore did not receive the discount.

Interestingly, the rate discount or rebate would have been simply the exposure that the car-side advertising got by rolling past onlookers. The shipper owned the car and the ad, so no favor was granted in the benefit of those two factors. But the railroad hauled the car past the onlookers, which added the value to the advertising.

This raises this question: Were the pre-1900 billboard cars more common in the east where the population density of ad viewers was the greatest?

I think you are missing the point. As the regulations stood as of 1934, the railroad was obligated to supply a car for the shipper's load. If the shipper supplied the car (either via direct ownership or through long term lease) the railroad was obligated to pay the shipper a mileage rate for it's use. So, the railroads were paying for the privilege of hauling the shipper's ads around.

But as I understand it, this wasn't the underlying issue. The railroads didn't like the private lease fleets, because they were obligated to maintain a fleet of cars which were only used during peak traffic flows, meanwhile they were obligated to pay mileage to use the shipper's cars while their own fleet sat. So, they were trying all and any tactic to discourage the use of private cars; the advertising issue was just one of many.

Further, the ICC didn't prohibit the shipper from painting whatever they wanted on their cars, they were, after all, the shipper's property. The ICC simply ruled that the railroads did not have to accept a load in a car that carried advertising, which, of course, had exactly the same effect. It had an even more drastic effect, in that what shipper was going to risk painting their logo on the car (which was still allowable) and have a railroad refuse the car? Sure, the shipper could then complain to the ICC, but that would take months, while the shipper's load rotted in his car, possibly on an interchange track hundreds of miles from the shipper's plant. The end result was that over the course of four years, the reefer fleet became very plain looking indeed.

While as far as I know the same regulation was still in effect until the whole regulatory structure was revised by the Staggers Act of 1980, after WWII ended it appears that some common sense tempered the railroad's attitude, and colorful business logos became common once again, but never again did a business paint a whole list of their products on their freightcars.

Lead paint....Yes, that old bugaboo. In the years leading up to the 1960's white paint commonly contained "white lead" or basic lead carbonate, a cheap, white pigment. This form of lead pigment IS poisonous because if ingested, the acids in the digestive system work on the pigment and free the lead as soluble lead. That's BAD. There was another very common lead pigment in use called RED lead or lead oxide. This was commonly used in metal primers because it inhibited rust. It was MUCH less of an ingestion hazard because these primers were usually intended for large industrial structural applications. By 1970, almost ALL white paint contained titanium dioxide, a much more chemically stable and environmentally friendly white pigment. And red lead was being phased out due, not to its toxicity, but to its cost. By the end of the 1970's there was almost no paint manufactured that contained ANY soluble lead. The only lead that was used in paint by that time was in organic compounds that served as catalysts for curing the oils and oil-based resins of the time. And the amount of lead in these products was typically under 0.1 percent by weight. Today, even these compounds are no longer used.

So, the take away here is that if work is being done sanding or scraping artifacts painted prior to 1960, care must be taken to wear a respirator and to minimize the generation of dust. Paint on these artifacts will not jump off the object and poison you!

Dennis,

I understand your point about railroads not wanting to maintain the shipper’s cars. In rereading your earlier explanation, I can see how the railroads paying a mileage fee to the owners of the privately owned cars might be seen as a rate rebate. As you mentioned, the explanation is somewhat confusing because the issue seems to be mainly linked to the advertising.

What I have elaborated on above is my interpretation of what you posted in terms of the shipper’s advertising on cars they own as amounting to a rate rebate. I interpret a rate rebate to be, in effect, a rate discount. This would mean that shippers shipping in their own cars would get a better rate than shippers shipping in railroad-owned cars because their advertising would be getting free exposure. So that freebie would be the rebate. On the other hand, the railroads hauling the shipper’s cars for less money than they charge for the haul using their own cars does not seem like something free to the shippers.

But, if the point of outlawing advertising on refrigerator cars was that the railroads did not want to haul privately owned cars, as you explain, then how did the banning of ads benefit the railroads? The owners simply removed their advertising, and the railroads had to continuing hauling them despite their objections to the requirement to maintain them and paying mileage to the shipper.

Less incentive to own or lease cars if they couldn't be used as rolling billboards.

I will admit it's been a long time since I was in a discussion about this issue (with one of the authors of the above cited book) but I was left with the distinct impression that the real grievance was the mileage rate the railroads were forced to pay was, in their opinion, too high, since the shippers were leasing cars so cheaply that they were actually turning a profit on the car hire rate, which galled the railroads to no end. All the other complaints the railroads raised were just a mufti-pronged attack on the car leasing industry. The ICC could have lowered the rate, and could have set a different rate for cars carrying ads... but they didn't. Instead they allowed the railroads to refuse privately owned cars that carried advertising. Their reasoning? Who knows, it's difficult to say at this late date, but it appears to be the result of lobbying rather than logic. I will freely admit that I'm really more interested in the effect, no more colorful reefers for a long while after 1938, rather than the exact causes. But if some museum is going to develop a display about "billboard" reefers (and this car would be the perfect focal point) then that display should thoroughly explore all the reasons why the cars disappeared.

Back on page #2 of this thread I said I won't condemn the museum if they feel the need to paint this Kingan reefer to protect it. I will add, though, that the thought of someone rolling paint over this original car is so depressing that I may have to drink a glass of white lead to drown my sorrows.

Dennis,

I see what you mean. Banning the ads could have been just one tool to chip away at the incentive for the shippers to own the cars. Prior to this, I had never heard about the 1934 case involving refrigerator cars. It adds another interesting dimension to the apparent pre-1900 practice of plastering paper ad posters on the sides of railroad cars. As I mentioned, that earlier “billboard car” era has been an enigma in my personal experience. I first learned of it as a trivia point on a railroad trading card. I have seen other fleeting references to the practice suggesting that it was nearly universal in a specific era. Yet, don’t recall ever seeing one single photograph of such a billboard car.

This earlier era of car-sides simply being used by anyone to advertise on would have been quite different from the private car owners meticulously painting their own advertising on their cars such as was the common practice with refrigerator cars. The information posted by Ray Breyer above is actually the only detailed information that I have ever seen on this enigmatic first era of “billboard cars.” Although I have not actually made an effort to research the topic like Mr. Breyer is doing.

Here's a similar refrigerator car, recently discovered. Similar name, too.



Okay, so five days early...big deal!