Over these past few years we’ve seen quite a few photographs that Jack Delano made while visiting the Chicago and North Western Railway in the winter of 1942. He apparently had free reign to visit the entire Proviso yard and it’s facilities while there.

The road did some extensive rebuilding of it’s freight cars on the repair tracks. Here we see a freshly repainted hopper car receiving it’s lettering. Note the framed stencils that the workers are using to spray paint the lettering onto the car sides. It’s December, and there is snow on the ground, but the work must go on.

I also noticed that the workers weren’t required to wear spray masks for this work back in the day. Today they’d likely have not only respirators, but a full body suit to protect them from over-spray (the latter would make this job a lot kinder to their clothing).