Garth Groff <sarahsan@...>
Friends,
Something nobody has mentioned is that in the early years of the
20th century, some railroads were still buying dry pigment
(probably in barrels) and mixing their own paint with linseed oil.
Every mix would likely have been slightly different. This was done
on the Northern Electric Railway for the poppy-orange color used
on both their interurban cars and freight motors. When the road
was reorganized as the Sacramento Northern Railroad circa 1920,
passenger cars were repainted Pullman green and the freight motors
solid black. SN expert Bob Campbell thought that stocks of the
yellow pigment were still around after WWII and were used to paint
the yellow scare stripes on the electric locomotives. The SNRR and
SNRY built or completely rebuilt some of their wooden freight cars
up into the 1920s, and likely those cars where painted with
rollers and brushes, whether the paint was dry pigment or pre-mix.
When pre-mixed paint came along, many railroads still applied it
with brushes and rollers. Remember, even Henry had his Model-Ts brush
painted for many years. Then spray equipment became
common, and likely required a different formula to work in the
machines. This change could have marked a difference in how the
paint looked on some roads.
Those of you who know more about the history of railroad paint
might be able to suggest when pre-mix paint and then spray
equipment became common.
Yours Aye,
Garth Groff 🏴
toggle quoted messageShow quoted text
On 12/19/18 11:38 PM, Dennis Storzek wrote:
Another consideration concerning paint, color matching, and cost.
Anyone who has purchased paint commercially, even model paint,
knows that, unlike the paint department at the big box store,
different colors have different prices. And, unlike the fixed
chromatic values of the RGB phosphors on a computer monitor, paint
is made with pigments that, whether natural or synthetic, are not
a "pure" color. The end result is there is more than one way to
formulate an acceptable match to a desired color, and the way to
win that big contract is to figure out how to do it with the least
expensive pigments. This may explain why many railroads went to
darker freightcar colors when synthetic pigments became available.
In the days of natural pigment, the various natural clays colored
orange with the oxides of iron were likely cheapest; this may not
have been the easiest color to match with the new synthetics, and
one by one, the railroad's desire to have everything neat and tidy
was overruled by the potential for cost savings if the color could
be changed.
Likewise, new streamlined passenger trains should be matched
sets... but fifteen years later, when the only color the
accounting dept. was seeing was red, maybe matched sets were no
longer that important.
Then there were times when color was important simply because the
executive suite said it was. As related in The Little Jewel
Wallace Abby, who was involved in the affair, states that the Soo
Line's red, white, and black color scheme, developed for
locomotives just after the end of the time period of this list and
soon migrating to freightcars, was a direct result of the
mechanical department's cost cutting measures that eliminated the
imitation gold trim on the locomotives, turning them into solid
maroon blobs, on the eve of the merger that top management wanted
to portray, for PR purposes, as dynamic. Once the executive suite
was involved, they were several color changes on successive
locomotive orders until they were satisfied with the contrast
between the base color and lettering.
Moral of the story is there are many unseen forces at work, and
the desire that all things match is normally not the most
important of them.
Dennis Storzek
|
