Just a ramble here. While going through some of my N scale cars over the weekend, I ran across my Sargento Cheese car. I remember seeing pics of it getting painted over because it ran afoul of the laws governing billboard freight cars. So, why is it trucks can have billboard paint schemes and railroads can't? Just one example would be Crete has trailers that are billboard advertisements for Snapper lawn mowers. While Crete list these as dedicated service for Snapper, they spend half of their round trips carrying items not related to Snapper. I know there are at least two in the fleet that one of our warehouses loads out with rice weekly. It would be cool if we could ever see a return to billboard cars rather than blank canvas for graffiti vandals.
I wonder if that regulation has somehow been set aside? If not, there must be a loophole, as we can see plenty of freight cars out there today with large letters and logos.
I'm not sure that it'd be a good investment, as the railcar billboard would look great for a few weeks before a vandal sprayed it over with some sort of garbage. Truck trailers seem to escape a lot of this mess.
I would guess that might be due to the truckers being nearby a lot of the time. Parking at truck stops, or within company lots. A person caught there could sustain some interesting lumps and bumps....