General Motors needed to apply railroad logos to the Diesel locomotives they bought. Sometimes GM artists would enhance those logos, particularly when they were placed on the noses of the locomotives. Basic art work for the logos was often done by Barbara Luse.

Click image to download a 6.0-MB PDF with 40 railroad logos.

Greg Palumbo photographed 40 paintings of such logos, though they are showing some signs of age including yellowing at the borders. I’ve included all 40 paintings in the above PDF. Most of these logos are signed by Luse, but two are signed Bockewitz and one is signed J.J.H. The few that are dated are from 1946. Continue reading →

In 1935, GM was just getting started in the Diesel business and these two images show locomotives and trains that were first built in that year. The paintings are not signed but may have been done by Leland Knickerbocker or Paul Meyer.

Click images for a larger view. Click here to download a 4.0-MB PDF of high-resolution images of these two locomotives/trains.

The Flying Yankee was a near-duplicate of the first Zephyr. The train was built by Budd and General Motors provided the propulsion. This painting is so precise that close-up views look like a photograph of a model. Unfortunately, part of of the painting is torn off at the far right. Continue reading →

We’ve seen plenty of paintings by Ben Dedek, but here are ten more. Some of these have already been seen in the form of data cards, but the original paintings are higher in resolution and uncropped. Dedek’s name appeared on more than 100 data cards and as far as released works are concerned he was EMD’s most prolific illustrator.

Click any image for a larger view. Source: Palumbo. Click here to download a 18.5-MB PDF of high-resolution images of all these paintings. The size of the images in this PDF is based on the resolution of the original images, not the actual size of the paintings in inches.

This painting associated with an F3 data card we saw a few weeks ago. The full painting doesn’t give us that much more information, but it certainly shows that Dedek was dedicated to providing detailed vegetation and other landscaping surrounding the locomotive. Continue reading →

Paintings recently sold by Soulis Auctions reveal that GM proposed several different ideas for painting the E6 used for Illinois Central’s City of Miami, which began operating as an all-coach train in December 1940. In retrospect, I don’t think they picked the best design.

Click image for a larger view. Click here to download a 6.5-MB PDF of high-resolution images of these paintings. The size of the images in this PDF is based on the resolution of the original images, not the actual size of the paintings in inches.

The locomotive paint job had to coordinate with the train’s passenger cars, which were to be yellow with a green roof and green skirts with red stripes, a little too thick to be called pinstripes, between the green and yellow bands. Judging from the drawing numbers the above image was the first idea. This would have broadened the bottom green to become dominant on the locomotive nose, interrupted by the vertical red stripes reminiscent of vertical yellow stripes on the Santa Fe Warbonnet. Since IC’s green diamond logo is already green, it got a little lost on the green nose, plus dark green would not be highly visible at night. Continue reading →