I am trying to nail down the time frame that D&RGW NG 5500 Series and 5900 Series stock cars were painted black. Both historians Victor Stone in his book "Taking Stock..." and Robert Sloan in his book "A Century + Ten..." are in agreement that the 5000 series cars were painted black during their 1926 rebuild. It is not so clear about the one hundred 5900 series cars, which were built in 1923. Mr Sloan says they were painted black, but at that time it appears the standard color for NG freight cars was the existing Prince's Mineral Brown (adopted in 1903) or the new Freight Car Red, which appeared around 1920 or 1921. Mr Stone doesn't seem to mention the color that the 5900 series cars were originally painted. It seems unlikely that if they were painted brown or red when built in 1923, they would be undergo a costly repaint so soon in 1926 (in fact, the only heavy repairs accomplished on the 5900 series fleet occurred in 1927). Further complicating the issue, is a 1937 telegram from Alamosa to train masters in Durango, Gunnison and Montrose directing them not to load any red stock cars in their territory, but to send them to Alamosa to be painted black. Could the red stock cars mentioned in the telegram be the 5900 series cars?

Steve,
Try the Narrow Gauge Discussion Forum. They seem to have someone in their midst who will know the answer. Good luck.

How I've always understood it is that 1937 was the year that all stock cars were changed from Freight Car Red to black.

Randy Hees mentioned this in his presentation with Andrew Brandon at the 2023 National Narrow Gauge Convention.

How I approach it is that the 1937 telegram is a primary source document that multiple people have seen and can verify. I do not know what the primary sources are for Victor Stone. Sloan's Century +10 book is an excellent summary, but it is still incomplete and in spite of the updates in the second edition there are still gaps and errors simply because so little of the original railroad paperwork is accessible and much of the research was based on the notoriously inaccurate Maxwell drawings and the unverified word of old-timers in the hobby.