Reporting Marks

This is an incomplete summary of reporting marks used by North American railroads and private owners from c1920-present. The Official Railway Equipment Register (ORER) has provided lists of reporting marks for many years, along with a list of changes issue by issue. The complete list has been entered from a number of issues, and has been supplemented by the summary of changes from most issues from this time period. Older issues do not provide reporting marks for many smaller railways (and in some cases for private owners), and so they do not appear in this list either. It should be noted that some car owners have chosen not to list their cars in ORER (especially in recent years), and in some instances their elimination of their registration has been erroneously equated here with an elimination of their reporting mark. I have attempted to deal with this by adding the note "(unlisted)" or "(not listed)" — as this has been implemented during more recent times, only ORERs listed at right followed by an asterisk (*) have been handled in this manner to date. Occasionally a reporting mark is discovered that has not yet been located in an ORER, and these will be denoted as "not listed".

The ORER is inconsistent in how it handles eliminations of registrations and companies, and I have not attempted to determine the difference, simply listing all removals as eliminations. So, this can mean either the dropping of the listing in the ORER, or the elimination of the company and/or reporting mark. Similarly, I have not tried to note corporate name changes as such, simply entering them as an elimination followed by an addition under the same name.

Because of the size of this file, I have split it into alphabetic sections. Trailer Train/TTX reporting marks continue to appear on each list, but their definitions only appear on their own page.