Greenbrier Brand Guidelines: Gunderson’s Portland Shop, Twin-Stack Cars & a Lease Fleet

A Portland steel shop and a flatcar lessor.

The Greenbrier Companies builds and leases freight railcars from its base in Lake Oswego, Oregon, near Portland. Its history joins two older businesses. English Wikipedia says Greenbrier Leasing Corporation was formed in 1970 by Commercial Metals Company and the M.D. Friedman companies to lease flatcars, and that in 1981 Commercial Metals sold it to Alan James and William A. Furman, the owners of James-Furman & Company, who are named as the founders of The Greenbrier Companies. The company’s own timeline gives the same 1981 date for James-Furman’s purchase.

The second business is older. Greenbrier’s timeline dates its roots to 1919, when the Gunderson brothers’ Wire Wheel Sales and Service opened in Portland. English Wikipedia describes how Gunderson Bros. moved from wheels and trailers into barges in 1941 and how, during the Second World War, a loan from the United States Navy let it build a shipyard, where it made lifeboats, landing craft and other vessels as well as trailers for the US Army. After the war it built tugs, barges, water towers and bridges. In 1958 it won its first railcar order, for 200 boxcar underframes for the Southern Pacific, and in 1965 the family sold the business to FMC Corporation, which later ran it as its Marine and Rail Equipment Division.

In 1985 Greenbrier bought that division from FMC and gave it back the Gunderson name. The same year, the timeline says, Greenbrier introduced the Twin-Stack, an intermodal railcar built to carry containers stacked two high; English Wikipedia says about 3,000 were produced in 1990. A rail services division for repair and refurbishment followed in 1991, and in 1994 the company went public and took its present name, The Greenbrier Companies, Inc.

Mexico, Poland, Romania and Brazil.

From the late 1990s Greenbrier spread its manufacturing beyond Oregon. In 1998 it formed a joint venture with Bombardier at Sahagún, in Mexico, and bought Bombardier’s share in 2004; the plant is now Greenbrier Sahagún. The same year it bought the Polish wagon builder Wagony Świdnica. A second Mexican joint venture, with Grupo Industrial Monclova, followed in 2006, and a wholly owned plant at Tlaxcala opened in 2015, the company says. In Brazil it raised its stake in the Hortolândia builder now called Greenbrier Maxion to 60 per cent in 2017, and in Europe it combined its business with Romania’s AstraRail to form Greenbrier AstraRail, which the company says it controls with about 75 per cent. English Wikipedia lists European production at Świdnica and at Drobeta-Turnu Severin and Caracal in Romania.

At home, Greenbrier bought the manufacturing business of American Railcar Industries in 2019, adding tank car and covered hopper capacity, according to its timeline; English Wikipedia names US plants at Paragould and Marmaduke, Arkansas. The original Portland site went the other way. In January 2023 FreightWaves reported that Greenbrier would end railcar production at its Gunderson facility in Portland, in operation for more than a century, once its current commitments were finished, and that its barge business there was under review. English Wikipedia says the Gunderson Marine facility was sold to Oregon Green Manufacturing in 2023, ending Greenbrier’s marine work.

The product range covers most North American freight car types. English Wikipedia lists boxcars, covered hoppers, double-stack intermodal cars, flatcars, gondolas, tank cars and auto racks, including two of the company’s own car carriers: the Auto-Max, which the timeline dates to 1999, and the Multi-Max of 2013. The company says it entered the North American tank car market in 2008, and that in 2025 its high-strength steel gondola took second place for the Swedish Steel Prize awarded by the steelmaker SSAB.

Design and documentation.

Railcar and wagon lessors sell something most people only glimpse from a level crossing: the use of a freight car for a fixed term. Their identities are built for two audiences at once. One is the shipper, railroad or logistics firm signing a lease; the other is everyone who sees the car roll past, because the lessor’s name is often painted on the side of the wagon itself. The car body works as a moving sign for the company that owns it.

Their websites tend to be organised around equipment. Fleet pages are usually split by wagon type, so tank cars for chemicals and mineral oils sit apart from covered hoppers, gondolas, flat cars, boxcars and intermodal wagons, and locomotives often have their own section. Photographs show the cars as the companies publish them, side-on and in yards or on the main line, with the lessor’s name and markings clearly legible.

Service pages carry much of the rest. Lessors describe maintenance workshops and field teams, training on handling wagons, and customer portals where fleets can be managed online. Several now present telematics: sensors and wireless devices that report a car’s location, condition and cargo status in near real time. Sustainability pages make the case for rail freight more broadly, and some describe the conversion or rebuilding of older cars.

Several of these companies are listed or owned by infrastructure investors, so investor pages, quarterly results and fleet counts take up a large share of what they publish. Palettes in this category are often restrained, with blues, reds, greens, greys and black recurring as our interpretation of the sector rather than as any company’s official colours. The guides that follow use tones of our own choosing.

A builder that keeps its own fleet.

Leasing is where Greenbrier began, and it remains a large part of the business. Its leasing arm, Greenbrier Leasing Company, says it has more than 40 years of experience and offers full-service and net leases, purchase-leasebacks and per diem leases on auto racks, boxcars, centerbeam cars, covered hoppers, gondolas, intermodal units and tank cars. In 2021 Greenbrier formed GBX Leasing with the Chicago asset manager The Longwood Group to build a fleet of leased cars made mainly in its own plants; FreightWaves reported in January 2023 that Greenbrier had bought Longwood’s minority stake, making GBX Leasing wholly owned. Greenbrier’s website gives its lease fleet as about 17,000 railcars, alongside 22,000 units delivered in fiscal 2025. Greenbrier Management Services handles maintenance planning, car hire and regulatory paperwork for other owners’ fleets, and in 2021 the company joined RailPulse, a coalition promoting GPS and other telematics on North American freight cars, its timeline says.

The leadership has changed in recent years. Lorie Tekorius became chief executive and president on 1 March 2022, when co-founder William Furman stepped down as chief executive, English Wikipedia says. On 31 August 2026 Greenbrier announced that she would retire on 6 January 2027 and that Brian Comstock, president of its Americas business, would succeed her on that date, according to a TipRanks report carried by The Globe and Mail. The company’s website carries the tagline “Moving What Matters.”

For a design guide, Greenbrier shows how a railcar maker can present building, leasing and maintenance as one company, under one name, on plants in several countries. Compare Trinity Industries, another North American builder and lessor of railcars, and Union Pacific, a North American freight railroad. For this guide we use a deep forest green, steel grey and a sandy tone with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep Greenbrier’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.