Vintage Trolley Color Pics

By Alfred Barten

"Vintage Trolley Color Pics" sounds too good to be true, right? Well, at the end of this article is a collection that comes with a high degree of certitude. It's a series of marketing illustrations by the Standard Motor Truck Company, maker of trolley trucks. The illustrations appear to be authentic representations of cars about to be delivered to their customers.

Difficulties in Determining Vintage Colors

There are countless histories and photos available of early-day trolleys, but for the modeler they all lack one thing - color. We didn't have significant color photography until Kodachrome was introduced in 1935. For scenes before that time we have to rely on other means, often the work of artists. Color postcards were just that - black and white photos hand-colored by artists and then printed en masse. The difficulty here is that the artist wasn't the photographer and only knew what colors he/she was asked to use. Lacking any specific information, the artist provided his/her own colors. To illustrate my skepticism regarding postcards, here is a well known card of New York's hobble skirt cars (aka stepless cars) running on Boadway.


Postcard showing New York Railways stepless cars in Third Avenue Railway's yellow and red colors.

The cars, which were the creation of Frank Hedley and J.S. Doyle of New York Railways, previously the Metropolitan Street Railway and later known as the Green Line, are colored red and yellow, the colors of rival Third Avenue Railway. I believe the proper colors for the stepless cars were green and white (prototype #5000) or green and cream (cars in service). I know street railways changed colors now and then and that sometimes they were inconsistent in the coloring from one car to another, but to be known as the Green Line and to paint your cars in your rival's red and yellow livery seems implausible in the extreme.


Black and white builder's photo of prototype stepless car #5000. Colors are probably green and white.


Postcard view of prototype double decker stepless car #6000. Car is colored green and white - correct in my estimation

My guess is the artist for the hobble skirt card used the yellow and red colors from this next postcard illustrating the New York Public Library at the corner of Fifth Avenue and 42nd Street. These colors are correct since the cars operating on 42nd Street were Third Avenue Railway cars.


Postcard view of New York Public Library at Fifth Avenue and 42nd Street. Cars shown belong to Third Avenue Railway, and are correctly shown in yellow and red.

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