Q: I’m building a layout based on the early Burlington Northern in Idaho. I’ve seen a number of photos of renumbered locomotives and cabooses. Most have white numbers and reporting marks, but I’ve seen a few prototype photos online with the data in black. Did BN have a standard font and size for renumbering equipment, or did they just use whatever was laying around at the time. Do you have any tips for modeling these renumbers? — Mike, via email
A: Dan Holbrook, a retired Burlington Northern employee who models the Twin Ports of Duluth, Minn., and Superior, Wis., in HO scale, has a website covering the early years of the BN (danielholbrook.smugmug.com). The site is neatly organized into folders covering a variety of topics, including diesel locomotives, cabooses, operations, modeling, and more.
The folder you’ll be most interested in is BN Painting Diagrams. Inside, there’s a subfolder called Stenciling Details. There you’ll find four downloadable files with BN diagrams that show where the road numbers and reporting marks were to be applied to road switchers, cab units, road locomotives, and end-cab switchers.
Burlington Northern renumbering used a standard font (name not known) and size for renumbering diesels and cabooses. On locomotives, the road numbers on the sides were 9″, while the reporting marks were 4″. On units with numbers and marks on the ends, all data was 4″ tall.
Most number boards had 7″ digits. If the numbers were smaller than 7″ (think switcher number boards), the digits were “to be stenciled in the form presently used on the parent road.”
After studying images in Burlington Northern Railroad Cabooses 1970-1995 by Robert C. Del Grosso, it appears cabooses followed a similar practice, with 9″ road numbers and 4″ reporting marks on the sides of the body and ends of the cupola. However, there were some variations. That’s why it’s important to use prototype photos as a guide.
The renumbering information was applied in white when the background color was black, blue, green, or red. Black was used on aluminum, orange, stainless steel, white, and yellow backgrounds.
Rail Train Hobbies has two HO scale Burlington Northern decal sets, NJ-010 and NJ-011. Both of these sets contain what the manufacturer refers to as “Hill Lines Patch Numbers” as well as digits for the number boards. Microscale Decals produces several BN locomotive and freight car sets in HO and N. The numbers and reporting marks in these sets can be harvested for renumbering projects.
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