Logo

Designing a logo for your railroad, especially a freelance railroad, can give your railway some real Character.  Though the Bard Creek is named after a real creek in the area of Colorado being modeled, no such railway existed.  Instead I want to have a freelance design where I can copy the equipment, standards, regulations, and operations from other railroads to best serve my imaginary line.  

Logos are essential to many railroads.  The Union Pacific has their red white and blue Shield, Canadian Pacific has their beaver, Santa Fe used to have the classic warbonnet scheme on their locomotives, Grand Trunk is known for their bright blue with red fronts.  I could go on for paragraphs.  All these logos are advertisement so that their company name is known to all.  McDonald's is a great example of this type of advertisement in the real world as even two year old children will recognize the golden arches, and this is before they can even read!  So in order to gain attention, plus give your railroad very well deserved character, logos are important.  So What's my Logo?

For Steam engines, I plan to have a regular engine black color that would have come from the factory, but the decals I want to look something like this:

The Lower left design is my favorite and I likely would use this on tenders of steam engines as well as early diesel locomotives.  The Logo on the right would look great on older, 1860's-1870's locomotives while the Logo on the upper left would look good on locomotives built into the 1920's.

Paint scheme is part of the logo too.  As I said, I plan to use primarily black on the locomotives because in the 1860's to the 1880's the companies which served the silver mines weren't all that  worried about image.  As Tourism becomes a more prominent part of the railroad, then locomotives started to have more colorful schemes.  Nothing is more true ot this statement than the yellow silver, and black color of the Durango and Silverton Narrow Gauge.  The cars used on the modern tourist railroad are all from the 19th and early 20th century, and it was at that time that tourism started to become profitable in Colorado.  When the railroad first laid tracks to Silverton, you can be sure the painters in the locomotive shops weren't worried about how pretty the locomotives were to the public eye and more worried about covering up all that soot and grime under a fresh coat of paint.

Passenger Cars, which I would use during train shows, will definitely use the logo on the lower left of the image above, the mountain logo.  The overall color of the car is undecided yet, but I might lean towards either a yellow like the D&S NGRR or towards a maroon like my favorite Canadian Pacific heavyweight cars.