In the early days of Amtrak, formed in 1971, the trains consisted of a hodge-podge of passenger cars from a variety of railroads. It took a while for all the cars to be repainted into Amtrak paint, and even then, the trains still lacked a unified appearance as fluted-side and smooth-side cars were freely mixed. On March 10, 1974, an Amtrak San Diegan, photographed in Fullerton, California, included a mix of former Santa Fe fluted-side coaches and smooth-side former Southern Pacific coaches. Amtrak coach 7508 was still unpainted – and unrenumbered as well. While the red stripe above the windows had been painted silver in a half-hearted attempt to make this car blend in, it retained its SP reporting marks and car number: 2387. (Note that the two SP coaches further back in the train have retained their red stripe.) SP 48-seat coach 2387 was built in 1947 for the SP then-new Shasta Daylight. The Shasta Daylight's cars featured larger windows than was found on earlier Shasta Daylight cars in order allow passengers great views of the scenery along the route between Oakland CA and Portland OR. Unlike the two previous Daylights, the cars Shasta Daylight's cars were built as smooth-side cars. SP trains 9 and 10 had a fast 15-hour 30-minute schedule in either direction for the 713-mile (1,147 km) trip through some of the most beautiful mountain scenery of any train in North America. By the 1960s, changes were made to these cars to reduce maintenance costs, such as the simplified aluminum with red stripe paint scheme, removing the luggage elevators (note the square plate welded over the location of the elevator door next to the vestibule) and the trap-door steps were retrofitted to be permanently "down" to eliminated maintaining moving parts (compare 2387's vestibule to the Amtrak coach to the right of it, with still has an operating "trap door.") It wouldn’t be much longer until Amtrak's San Diegans would be equipped with new Amfleet coaches.
Not
just heritage schemes, not just commemorative schemes - this album is devoted to some of the world's most interesting paint schemes, past or present.
