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I'm doing '72, which is great because the yellow TTX didn't come in until 1970, before that they were a dark mineral brown. Mixed cars.What impresses me looking at old photos is the mix of brown, filthy yellow turned brown, and an occasional 'new' yellow car in a train. But even the 'new' ones weren't 'new' enough to impress me as having a white deck. I always thought it was a light gray antiskid. Just dirt.And by '74, I was watching EL scream by with all TTX piggyback trains, again, in a dust storm. That shows in all my photos.I think that mix is important, even if your era is beyond the brown cars - these cars didn't get beat, but they were operated at speed, and trailers create just quite the airflow vortexes moving at any decent pace that suck up to dust them. Always a layer. TTX did contract their car repairs out to regional shops, we had one locally for Railbox cars only. So you may have an excuse for a freshly painted car, but to me that's still a stretch. Those were really high-use cars, still are.I'd made a mix of earth brown and grimy black in acrylic, and one of the few weathering things that an airbrush does really well is that level of dusting. You can follow it up with some heavier deck stuff, but overall, it's a gritty fade.
Plus, those ACF screw hitches should be black....
Did they change the paint color when they went to fixed hitches?
I was asked off-list if Trailer Train uses black to designate a rigid hitch and orange to designate a collapsible hitch.I think the answer is no (more on that at the end), but what hitch color denotes depends on what era you are looking at.Originally, Trailer Train painted all hitches the same mineral red as the rest of the car. AFAIK, the first use of orange hitches was in the mid-1960s to denote an XTTX car with four hitches (all orange) capable of loading two 40s or three 28s. This practice ended before the delivery of the first flush-deck cars in 1968.When trailer Train switched from mineral red to yellow in mid-1970, black was used for all hitches at first. Then in 1976 TT began converting their Pullman LP3 & 4 automatic locking hitches to more reliable semi-automatic LP43SAs & 4SAs and began painting them orange to differentiate them. ACF's screw-driven Model 2 & 5 hitches that required an air wrench to both lock and unlock and raise and lower them, and ACF Model 4 knock-downs remained black.Finally, in the mid-1980s with the advent of back-to-back RTTX Twin 45 cars that could only be loaded from overhead, It became possible, even desirable to use rigid hitches, but, collapsable hitches were still required on cars converted to Triple 28/Twin 45 and TTWX Twin 45 tofc/cofc service. Since then I've seen both rigid and collapsable orange hitches, and even orange hitches in well cars, so I suspect that orange continues to signify a semi-automatic hitch, whether rigid or collapsing, but I'm not positive about that. Since this era is really outside of my interest does anyone on-list know for sure what orange designates in the Twin 45 and later era?Jim Eager Toronto, Ontario, Canada
By the late '70s the use of orange on auto or semi-auto hitches and black on screw hitches (the several ACF designs) was more a quick, at-a-glance way to tell the crane operator which direction to come at the hitch with the trailer's kingpin. You come at automatics from the front and screws from the rear. So the color refers to the hitch-plate design, not whether the hitch is rigid or collapsible.Indeed, by the early '90s, the "orange=automatic" was so ingrained at TTX that when the all-purpose well cars came out their hitches were orange, even though you come at them from the rear.Only on the RTTXs would the idea that orange=rigid and black=collapsible make any sense, as they were originally outfitted with orange, rigid, semi-auto hitches at the ends and a recycled black ACF screw hitch in the middle. When the RTTXs were overhauled in the '90s, now-surplus collapsible semi-auto hitches were installed and the long-despised screw hitches were turned into razor blades. Those replacement hitches are correctly painted orange.Painting a screw hitch any color other than black makes little sense, since it takes so much heavy grease to keep them operable that regardless of paint color, they _will_ be black in short order. However, I have seen a few on non-TTX cars that were painted orange.<snip>Piggybacking: It's a dirty job, and I'd rather somebody else do it....Scott Chatfield
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Topic: Painting the deck of TTX flatcars white? (Read 1092 times)
