This is hard to believe!

[Russ Bellinis]

I wouldn't be surprised at the price of repainting a box car being $30,000.00. I suspect that the paint may be more expensive than automotiv paints other than some of the custom colors used by hot rodders. Typically, I don't think railroads repaint freight cars completely except when they are rebuilt. When an old boxcar is sold to a different railroad, typically the logo and reporting marks are "patched" and the rest of the paint is left as is, like the reefers that Gary is modeling for his "spud plant." If a panel is repalced or a plug door is replaced, only the part being replaced is painted. In fact, at a railroad safety class I took while working for Carrier-Transicold, the maintenance manager for BNSF was teaching the portion of the class on working safely around reefers that are spotted at an industrial site, and one of the guys in the class asked how often freight cars were washed. He said NEVER. "We don't care what they look like as long as they haul the freight and make money." Any car that hauls a commodity that might be contaminated by a spill from a previous load (such as reefers and tank cars) will get a washout or even a steam out when needed, but the outside is only washed by "mother nature" when it runs through a rain storm.

I'm not sure what paint is specified for railroad equipment today. I think it used to be DuPont Imron two part epoxy paint, but I don't know if that is a paint that has been dropped from production for environmental reasons. Remember when comparing an automotive paint job to a railcar paint job, that a car is expected to be kept in a garage (even if most are not), and the paint job is expected to last 5 perhaps 10 years. The car manufacturers design a car to last 10 years/100,000 miles. A boxcar is expected to last 40 years between rebuilds!