GEC's Layout Progress

[Green_Elite_Cab]

By 2013, I see very few ex ATSF cars in red with the big logo -- there are some left with small ATSF lettering. These days, there's more variation in the cars that come out of Modesto. A lot of cars lettered for GERS short lines are in this traffic lately:

BNSF runs a regular Modesto-Barstow manifest that hauls mostly wine cars. The cars above were in Modesto, so they're almost certainly carrying Gallo wine.

The big dividing line for era, it seems to me, is extravagant graffiti, which really got going in the late 1990s (not a whole lot of graffiti on Conrail-era freight cars in DVDs) and conspicuity stripes, post 2005. As you say, there's a lot of fudge between the late 1970s and mid 1990s otherwise.

I've actually seen NOKL boxcars just like that, but at Roosevelt Paper, just up the road from the above photos in Hainesport. They usually carrying big rolls of paper. I'm betting these wine cars in your photos are some of the same ones here.