I like the roof (and roofwalk) colors

And note the ratio of wood roofwalks (most) to steel (very few)

Ken

Understood, but I later said I used semi-gloss and satin, not gloss.

Nelson Moyer

Photos are good for weathering, chalk marks, etc. but not so good for color. There are two basic approaches to painting freight cars, paint for a new car paint job and weather according to age after painting and car usage, or paint to resemble faded oxidized paint and weather from there. Obviously the first approach requires more fading and weathering effort for an old paint heavily used look. I use the first approach, paint as new, and do the fading and weather later, or not for some cars.

As for freight car reds and browns, by far the most accurate paints are from Tru Color because they went to great effort to hire color consultants with access to prototype railroad color drift cards, and they matched their colors to the prototype as closely as possible. If you want the new paint look use Tru Color. If you want faded oxidized paint, it really doesn’t matter that color use as long as you’re in the right red or brown family.

Then there is the topcoat issue. Prototype freight cars aren’t dead flat when newly painted, despite the fact that model railroad tradition demands a flat finish, typically Dullcote. Lately, it’s not uncommon to see various degrees of paint shine from fairly glossy to satin and flat, again depending upon the car age since last painting. Tru Color dries glossy, which means you don’t have to spray a gloss coat before decaling – one less step than using a flat freight car color. I use semi-gloss, satin, and flat clear coats to provide another indication of age since painting.

Be aware that some acrylic clear coats cloud paint color, whereas lacquers typically don’t cloud the color. Future is an exception to the acrylic clouding issue.

Then there’s the issue of color temperature of layout lighting, which has been exhaustively discussed here, so look at the archives. Your freight car reds and browns will look quite different under warm lighting than under cool lighting. I use 5000 K lights with a high CRI index for true color rendition.

Color rendition of film has already been discussed. Time of day and sun angle were not mentioned, but they affect color, as does atmospheric haze, etc., etc.

So selecting paint colors by matching color photographs is a gross oversimplification, especially with color photographs from the 1940s and 1950s.

Nelson Moyer

Rob;

As I recall, there are those great Delano photos, as well as others, taken in Chicago during WW2 that include some CB&Q cars.

Elden Gatwood

Eric;

Yes, and converted back to GS thereafter, sloped drop doors being removed 1929-’45-ish.  The two photos of coke racks on GSD we put in the book are instructive.

Yes, I have, but do not have those materials at-hand.  It also corresponds to the rebuilding of H22 into H21A, as need for other “coke” cars also shifted to the in-plant RRs that replaced the beehives and banked coke works.  Remaining coke cars on the PRR, at least, were just using under-loaded H21’s (or whatever class), or those one-off coke box cars that remained (including GTC26 and GTC29, IIRC).   Believe it or not, a handful of the latter ran into the sixties.   There were no other dedicated coke cars I can find on the PRR.

Someone I know is doing research on the other cars owned by Frick, et al., that ended up being sold to the PRR as a result of this consolidation to big coke plants like Clairton.  I don’t know when that will be available.

The things interesting in the H22 photo are not only the banks of ovens behind, but the “flaked” coke typical of those ovens, in the H22.  Something to consider in modeling.

Finally, here is an excerpt from my analysis of industries on the Monongahela Division/Branch, for 1918, 1939, 1945, 1962.  Note the precipitous drop between 1918 and 1939, in coke manufacture and loading (from 11 goes to 2).  And this is ONLY from industry on the Mon, not the Southwest Branch, MRY, or other feeding or adjacent lines.

Business Traffic by Commodity/Industry - 1962

Here’s also a couple more to whet your appetite, attached.  The postcard of box cars at the coke works, 1910:  Can you imagine how many cars they torched using un-quenched coke?

Elden Gatwood