Re: D&RGW Number only boxcars

Pretty much the case, from what I know. Crews and shippers had to be able to identify car numbers. Since the narrow-gauge cars were "captive' to the narrow-gauge system--the other weights, etc. and other stencilled information became sort of superfluous--especially since the boxcars and the like tended to have the same load limits, etc. within each class or subclass.

There were very few cars repainted after the massive repainting in 1949, so car numbers were probably the only thing usually repainted after that--other than the stencilling of journal repacking dates and brake system inspection dates. When I started going to narrow-gauge country in the '60's those maintenance stencils were about the only thing "fresh" one would usually see on the freight equipment.

In the last years of operation, the Grande got so lax that when a car was taken out of revenue service and put into non-revenue work service, the letters "AX" would be stencilled on the car (denoting non-revenue) without even bothering to repaint the rest of the car number at the same time. You would see a lot of bright "AX's" stencilled on cars, with the remainder of the number barely readable. By the way, "AX" was used on standard gauge equipment that the Rio Grande had removed from revenue service, as well.