GN 138660

Box Car

Built in September, 1967 by Pacific Car & Foundry. It is a 50' plate-C high capacity box car, with cushion underframe, ABD brakes, roller-bearings, and double plug doors. These cars were delivered in the then-new "Big Sky Blue" corporate colors. Click here for an historic photo of Big Sky Blue GN 138466, from the same series. Photo from the collection of Ralph Back.

In June 2004, BNSF donated "identical triplets" 236407, 236660, and 375845. They had been retired due to bad-order door mechanisms and their proximity to mandatory retirement age.

A young MTM member repainted 236660 as an Eagle Scout project. The original number, GN 138660, was known with certainty because of the BN practice of stencilling the original road and car number on the center sill. The paint is a PPG industrial catalyzed urethane, computer color matched from original GN paint samples. The lettering was done by the scout's dad with hand-cut paper stencils, synthesized from historic photos and current car data. The logo circle was drawn to the correct radius with a trammel, and "Rocky" filled in free-hand by transferring grid points from a photograph. It rolled out of the paint shop and into the bright sun on Saturday, February 19th, 2005.

Big Sky Blue was the Great Northern's last paint scheme before the Burlington Northern merger. It was introduced in the spring of 1967 by a secretly-painted train of business cars, and was to be applied to all rolling stock. However, not everything got repainted by the 1970 merger date. It is said the same design firm in St Paul designed both the GN "Big Sky Blue" and BN "Cascade Green" paint schemes. They are very similar.

Click Here for an as-donated photo.

GN 138660 will be used in a supporting role at Osceola, Wisconsin, and therefore had to receive the museum's "MNTX" reporting marks. (Sister 138407 has also been restored to Big Sky Blue, but because it is exhibited at Jackson Street, wears the correct "GN" reporting mark.)

Sources:

1. "Great Northern Equipment Pictorial Book Two - Freight Cars," by Scott R. Thompson; data p118.