Hi Andrew,

There wasn’t much reason to go into the 1970s or 1980s with the ART history since the last color scheme was the bright orange with black outline MP and N&W heralds and little changed after that time. The color photos in the Mechanical Reefers chapter covers what ART cars looked like in the final years (pgs 202-208).

As to your question, there was a yellow and an orange scheme. The color photo on page 186 is perhaps the best comparison of the yellow and orange scheme, although I am pretty convinced that there were more than one shade of yellow.

The “yellow” scheme with black outline heralds had boxcar red ends and silver/aluminum roofs.

The “orange” scheme had either all over orange or orange with silver roof. Most orange” mechanicals had silver/aluminum roofs, but a few white roofs are known.

Color was a difficult thing to determine in a lot of situations. Note the cars on page 205. Since they all carry the Wabash flag, we should expect that they are all “yellow” cars, but each would seem to be a completely different color. Of course lighting, weathering, and care of the original photograph all make a difference.

The orange scheme came along after the merger of the Wabash into the N&W. I have seem some “yellow” cars with the N&W herald (pg 215), but no “orange” cars with the Wabash flag.

Finally, yes, the orange paint faded, and faded rather quickly. Again it depended on weathering. Some “orange” cars seem to be a darker orange if they has a lot of road grime, and some “clean” orange cars looked almost pinkish.

I don’t know how one would do it, but an analysis of color photos, perhaps matching the color in a photo to Pantone colors, would give a wide range of shades.

I ran into this same problem with the caboose book. In the 1960s some cabooses were painted with a paint that faded quickly to an orange color. The thought was that the railroad used the same orange on its cabooses as the orange reefers, but company correspondence clearly states that the red used on these cabooses faded with the acid detergent they used in the wash racks. So a caboose painted red originally (actually a vermilion), faded to orange (a component of the vermilion paint) after a few times through the wash racks. If a faded caboose was recently washed, it could still retain some sheen, and this gave rise to the thought that they were painted orange originally. So, I wonder if the ART colors faded as they were washed and that is how we ended up with rather bright lemon through bright orange with shades in between as the cars went through the 1960s to the 1970s. Could “warm yellow” fade to “lemon yellow” and “bright orange” fade to “pink?”

Since very few ART company records exist, it is hard to pin down. We didn’t go into this discussion in the book because it was all speculation, and we did not want to create a sense of finality to the color story. There is more work to be done.

Jerry Michels