Name that Locomotive...
Thursday, February 8, 2007 at 2:41AM I happened to be pouring some orange juice this morning when I noticed something railroady on the carton.
(Oh, hmmm, yes, that’s my son in the background with his face in his plate. We are all pretending to be puppies at breakfast this morning!)
Railroading in the mainstream
Cool, I thought. It’s always good to catch a glimpse of railroad action in normal life, such as in a TV commercial or perhaps in a movie. For a moment, I imagine it seems perfectly normal to everyone to have a train front and center, not just me who is nuts about trains. But then the moment passes because you quickly come back to remembering that trains for most people are about as significant as the period at the end of this sentence. Which also explains the comments as I was taking photographs of the orange juice carton. But I digress.
Anyhow, I say ‘something’ because on closer inspection of the carton, here’s what I saw!
Hmmm, I thought. What the..!! Trains on the orange juice carton - good. Weird orange frankenlocos under any circumstances - bad. The folks at Tropicana clearly saw the marketing value of pointing out that the good people of America order their Tropicana OJ by the trainload. They’ve just approached it in an unusual way from a railfan perspective.
Let’s put that big ol’ train thingy on the box…
It turns out that trains are inconveniently long and skinny in a particularly annoying horizontal manner too. Not at all like the nice square photo space on the box. And of course, the real deal in this story is the reefer with the word Tropicana on it. So they have a dilemma back at the Tropicana office. They could just put a nice pic of the reefer, but then it looks like it is just standing still. The maketing guy yells “Ya gotta have a choo-choo to make it look like it’s moving, you know, racing along the track to get to the customers”. “Well that’s just great”, groans the art department because now we’re back to that whole long and skinny thing again!
Photoshop to the rescue
Relying on the fact that the public has pretty much no idea of what a train actually looks like, the clever folks in the art department save the day by, well, mashing the reefer and the locomotive together.
It’s weird how they’ve done it. I can see that lopping the radiator section off the locomotive to shorten it would be an appealing idea. And they’ve done a nice job of cutting the the fuel tank in half to make the trucks fit the new shortened length. You’ll notice for example the locomotive fuel tank is missing the other air reservoir found on a modern GE unit.
Also strange are the locomotive trucks and fuel tank under the reefer! The Tropicana train is quite a long one as I understand it, requiring multiple units. The trucks and fuel tank under the reefer belong to another unfortunate GE or EMD unit in the consist, leveled in the name of a breakfast beverage, as the art folks have put the image of a Tropicana reefer on top of the locomotive body.
Hey presto, a choo-choo pulling a reefer. So why not just get an easy shot of the trailing unit in the consist and the first reefer in the train? Perhaps the reefer they liked was five cars deep. Or maybe the last unit had its cab facing the train. Besides, we’re talking about an orange juice carton here remember, not anything anyone is actually going to care about! Accuracy is plainly pretty far down on their list!
What’s wrong with this picture?
Anyway, always a glutton for punishment, I put the picture in front of my family and asked the question. No one thought the picture looked funny, not the locomotive or the reefer. They did, however, all think the palm tree at the front looked fake!! They didn’t like how the fronds were leaning. Public - 4, Daddy/Coxy - 1; game over!
So having again confirmed that normal mortals have no actual concept of trains, I should just be glad to see anything railroady at breakfast time and just enjoy it, even if it is an all-orange SW70-Dash8 pulling a 4400hp reefer!!!
Reader Comments (2)
And here I thought I was bad for pointing out the Conrail engine that popped up for half of a second when we were watching Rocky II this weekend.
Jbisti, we should all appreciate our descerning railroad tastes for the gifts that they are. Even if everyone else can't tell!
- Coxy