Different shades of grey. Actually the NYC TTG had the lighter shade at the window belt and darker above and below. Many Pullman pool cars were about the same as the SP Lark, UP Overland and many ATSF smooth side cars at various times with the darker widow belt.
ATSF's Raton Tunnel through Raton Pass, east portal, taken from cab of F7 309L pulling Train #23, the "Grand Canyon" near Wooten, Colorado (note the Colorado State Line marker) on August 19, 1967. Roger Puta photo.
Thanks for posting these. I'm a big fan of them too. I guess that they've become rare with generic PTC Vaders now reigning eveywhere? I managed to capture a few of them on our trips west, this from 06/12/1997 at Joseph City, AZ.
From the early '50s of a lady posing next to her '53 Buick Super V8 on Route 66 headed west towards Gallup, New Mexico probably in the Ft. Wingate, NM area with Church Rock in the background. The train is a Santa Fe MOW train. Photo from Derik Lattig collection.
Erie Built 90 LAB pulling into Chicago in 1949. A shadow lined heavyweight baggage dorm in the consist.
^^^^^ Possibly, the heavyweight car was 1302 Buffet-Library car, being surplus from the discontinued Valley Flyer consist and was available to transcon consists which were short a car after Super Chief derailed entering Winslow and its LW buffet Library car was destroyed. To plug that gap, a LW buffet library car was taken from Chief's sets and put in the Super Chief sets. Then this heavyweight car was used to fill in the resulting gap in the Chief's consists.
It stands for "lead" unit. The one spot twins were introduced for whatever reason as 1A and 1B, then for whatever other reason became 1 and 1A just about the time the old 1B turned 1A became a booster. After that, lead units had no letter. But when talking about sets, 38ABC seems to be only three units. So the L started out an unofficial thing employees did to avoid confusion.
From 03/1975 at San Diego, my Dad shot this from his hotel room window while on a business trip. Note the REA trailer is it?
Oh, yes. In later years the logo replaced "Railway Express Agency" with REA. There was also a large white X to jazz it up. Easier to read from a distance. Probably easier to stencil, too.
Speaking of Railway Express, I saw this neat bit of history still intact at the station at Bloomington, IN 04/12/1987.