Also keep in mind that railroads seldom actually owned cars bearing their names and logos- ESPECIALLY shortlines. The title on most equipment "owned" by railroads are usually held by a financial institution or equipment trust company and leased to the railroad. On almost every new diesel locomotive today, plus a lot of freight cars, you will usually be able to find a plate somewhere on the equipment with a statement something along the lines of the ownership of that piece of equipment is subject to a security agreement filed with the Surface Transportation Board.

In the case of most shortlines like the LEF&C and Seattle & North Coast, they rarely had their own freight cars prior to the mid-1970's. The railroad industry experienced a general shortage of boxcars during this time period, largely due to low per diem rates on such cars (per diem in the amount a railroad pays the registered owner of a freight car for the time it spends on their line- i.e., rental fees). Several within the industry got the Interstate Commerce Commission to approve "Incentive Per Diem" boxcars, which rewarded railroads who bought new boxcars- or rebuilt older cars- with higher per diem rates as an incentive to add new cars to the nation's railcar fleet. Several venture capitalist firms saw an opportunity and incorporated railcar leasing firms to capitalize on incentive per diem craze- Itel and Brae were two of the biggest. Under a typical arrangement, the leasing company would own the cars and lease them to the shortline, and the car would be painted up in the shortline's colors (as with the LEF&C and S&NC cars). The railroad would pay some combination of either rental fees and/or turn over a portion of per diem payments to the leasing company. These leasing company focused a lot of their marketing efforts on western shortlines, especially lumber hauling shortlines...at the time, a lot of these shortlines generated substantial lumber traffic, much of it destined for eastern markets. The working theory in play here was that the shortline would load one of the new incentive per diem boxcars with lumber destined for eastern markets, with the belief that once the car got to the east- where most of the boxcar shortage existed- the eastern roads would keep the cars for their own uses, thereby racking up huge incentive per diem revenues for both the shortline and the leasing company. This is how the vast majority of the shortline cars came into being.

There were many problems with incentive per diem, chiefly that, in many cases and especially for bridge roads, the incentive per diem payments alone often exceeded the revenue the railroad generated for moving the car. The program faced a severe backlash and was eventually repealed. Many of the cars were cut up during the recession of the early 1980's, and those that remain in service today are generally owned by GE Capital (thanks to a long and complicated series of mergers and aquisitions). Your observations are correct that the various leasing companies have seldom invested in any more paint that necessary to change the reporting marks on these cars.

The Surface Transportation Board website has an extensive section dealing almost exclusively with "Recordations", which are the original trust/security/lease agreements between financial institutions, leasing companies, and railroads for these cars. You can probably find the agreements for the LEF&C cars with a little searching on that site, if you have the time and interest...those old agreements make for some fascinating reading.

Jeff Moore
Elko, NV