Black & White Versus Red And White

Looking through mags, I see that CN has done business car "Gatineau" in this bogus red and white scheme. Has Black and White been totally dumped and all CN business cars done in Red and White?

Anybody know when that change went down?

D/

D, I believe that was done around 2003. The main theme was to get people believing in "CN" rather than "Canadian National", due to the fact it was no longer exclusively Canadian after the IC acquisition, and was no longer a nationalized carrier either. At that time, the OCS was repainted from heritage green/yellow to red/white. I don't know that the OCS train has been in the Allan Fleming wht/black livery used by the Super Continental for quite some time, at least not since the IC merger if not before.

Supposedly the Chairman, a gentleman from BC, has mandated his private car remain in heritage yellow/green. Also, Metis, based out of Kansas City, and one other observation, are still in yellow/green.

That's fine and dandy except for one factor; the colors of the Canadian Flag are RED & WHITE. If you wanted to get away from a mainly Canadian identity image, they chose the wrong colors. They would have done better going back to green, black and gold.

Another factor in pushing for "CN" versus "Canadian" or "CanadiEn National"; getting away from dealing with bilingual spellings and paint...

D/

This 'CN' thing I think also was influenced by how much money was being spent on painting and then repainting the locos and cars. I remember hearing a conversation about this between some CN guys talking about the trains at one time having one side having 'Canadian' and the other side of said loco as 'Canadien'---I suspect things got confusing----

Reading my 2007 post, I see a lack of clarity. The B-train fleet was repainted from green/black Canadian National heritage colors into red/white CN colors because the CN noodle looks funky on the heritage colors. The original Alan Fleming black/white 1964 scheme was dumped from the fleet at the inception of Via, and then the biz train fleet was repainted in the 90's to the heritage colors.

I wouldn't mind seeing CN do a heritage locomotive effort - CN green, PGE, GTW, IC, GM&O, and now the USS roads. Maybe just leave one each locomotive from the USS/transtar roads in original paint.