Re: [CBQ] Diagonal Freight Car Stripe

["cbqbill1x via groups.io" <kybillhusb=gmail.com@groups.io>]

The following is from Artificial Intelligence

A red diagonal stripe about 6 to 8 inches wide across a railroad boxcar is not a standard, mandatory marking with a single universal meaning. Instead, it is most often used by individual railroad companies or private car owners as a non-standard visual signal for internal purposes, such as:

1. Special Service or Equipment
The most common and modern interpretation is that the stripe is a visual indicator of a special feature or restriction for that particular car. This allows yard workers and train crews to quickly identify the car's status without having to read small stenciling. Examples could include:

Designated Service: Indicating the car is assigned to a specific shuttle, yard, or a particular customer's traffic pattern.

Special Internal Equipment: Marking cars that have unique interior fittings, such as specialized loading devices (e.g., specific types of load restraints or cushioning).

Maintenance Status: Signaling that the car is awaiting or has recently received a certain type of maintenance or modification.

2. Historical or Company-Specific Coding
Some historical or regional practices have used colored markings for identification:

Yard Assignment: In some rail systems, different colored stripes were historically used to indicate the yard a car belonged to for organizational and tracking purposes.

Computer Tracking Experiment (Historical): In the 1960s, the Union Pacific railroad used a red dot on some cars as part of an early experiment to visually identify cars being tracked by a new automated computer system (COIN). While this was a dot, not a stripe, it shows that railroads have used distinctive red markings for internal tracking experiments.

Since the marking isn't governed by federal or industry-wide regulations like placards for hazardous materials, its exact meaning would be found in the internal operating rules of the railroad that owns the car.

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