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So i was out looking at Christmas lights near Sikeston, Missouri tonight and happened to get lucky enough to see a train passing through. The line is BNSF's "River Sub" from St. Louis to Memphis and it was carrying coal southbound to the SBMU power plant in Sikeston, pretty short rig too with only 5 cars or so.
Well anyway, the engine was still painted in the blue/yellow "Santa Fe" paint scheme. Is that common these days? I would have thought they would have repainted by now...
I have seen many of the premerger paint on BNSF. They still have some in the red and silver, yellow and blue, black and green and white face and green. UP still has some SP and DRGW still in pre merger paint. Most have been patched though. CSX and NS are actively in the process of painting everything they have. Can not say the same for BNSF and UP
Cool. The only thing we have around here is UP and BNSF from my knowledge. UP is about 40 minutes away and BNSF is about 15 from my house. It was cool looking, i love the old Sante Fe paint.
CSX has painted every last one of their Conrail engines. CSX has a few engines running around in their stealth and yellow nose stealth paint schemes.
NS is also actively painting out their Conrail fleet. They haven't painted out every single one yet, but they will be painting their Southern Railway heritage engine into black and white soon. They've also repainted the SD40-2s from CEFX (ex BN), and will repaint the SD60s from HLCX (ex UP) after rebuilding them into SD60Es (NS's in-house widecab/eyebrow cab conversion)
Blue + Yellow Santa Fe is still all over the BNSF system. BN green is also out there too in numbers, although in my area (Southern California) Santa Fe blue + yellow is easier to spot.
They are patched with small BNSF lettering, but otherwise still classic Santa Fe.
I guess the feeling is if the paint is still good, why repaint it. And these are all older locos that will someday be replaced, sl again why repaint? It also helps keep the heritage and pride of the Santa Fe and BN alive.
You can sometimes find equipment still running in premerger paint schemes as well as the previous owners' paint scheme with only the new owners' reporting marks in the case of second hand engines. It takes a long time and a lot of money to repaint an entire fleet of engines. Plus the railroad has to contend with not only the shops' current workload but also the fact that while being painted the locomotives are sitting on the shop floor instead of out on the line making money.
UP is slowly repainting all of the CNW units and it ticks me off. I still see a lot of photos online of NS trains which still have locos still in Conrail colors.
I see on the low end two old cr paint per day. I live about .3 mile away from the lines and see many trains going by. Just the other day I saw the old conrail leading 3 other md locos.
