Thank you, Tim. I can believe what you say without doing the Photoshop experiment, because in my other avocation, easel painting, the Impressionists and Josef Albers are some of my heroes. However, at the scale and under the viewing conditions of models, I think I'm going to have to take some step to model the effect -- perhaps mask the heralds before applying the last few coats of weathering spray, or lightly dissolve/lift the weathering over them. Sounds challenging. As Tony Thompson says in a following post, the comparable effect with lettering is hard to model. I can believe it.

Barry Roth

Well . . . OK if you say so. All the taconite I've seen has been rusty red. But in any event, the
blueness is on the inside of the car at the top of the side sheets, uniform (more or less) along the
length of the car, and the orangey-white-gray staining is below that.

SGL

Barry

I have a JPG color sampling of ACF box car reds from Ed Hawkins,
each color on a vertical strip, all the same size. If I change
the "background" color of the strips from white to black, there
is an immediate strong shift in perception that the colors are
now darker and more similar to each other than when the background
was white. The PFE emblems are white lettering on dark backgrounds.
The dirt layer is simply dark over an orange background. Take
the photo into Photoshop and clip the heralds, and play with
different background colors. I think you will perceive them very
differently depending on the background colors and brightness.

Tim O'Connor


At 12/5/2009 01:48 PM Saturday, you wrote:

On those dirty ol' reefers the UP and SP heralds/logos stand out is though they do not have the same coat of smuts as the rest of the sides. Except for the repack fields, the cars do not otherwise seem to have been sponged off, so does this result from the paint on the heralds being smoother and less retentive of road dirt?

Barry Roth

This is a personal favourite. Standard Railroad of the World modellers on this list can opine on standard PRR freight car red, but here's at least nine PRR hoppers, each of a slightly different hue--

http://www.shorpy. com/node/ 2799?size= _original

Steve Lucas.

really<< need now!) was the light gray-green used in the horizontal band

Two philosophical questions then:

1. If two cars were built the same day at the same place and painted from the same drum
of paint, coupled together and run together hauling the same cargos for ten years, would
you expect the colors of the two be virtually the same or markedly different after ten
years?

2. If two cars were built the same day by two different shops for two different railroads
and painted in markedly different colors, coupled together a week later and run together
hauling the same cargos for ten years, would you expect the colors of the two be virtually
the same or markedly different after ten years?

Barry Roth wrote:

On those dirty ol' reefers the UP and SP heralds/logos stand out is
though they do not have the same coat of smuts as the rest of the
sides. Except for the repack fields, the cars do not otherwise seem
to have been sponged off, so does this result from the paint on the
heralds being smoother and less retentive of road dirt?

This is something you see on box cars too, with white lettering
looking way too bright compared to the car side. The usual explanation
is that the paint "chalked" and sloughed off the dirt and uppermost
film of paint all the time. Sometimes you can see whitish streaking
beneath the lettering which seems to bear this out. it's a hard effect
to model.

Tony Thompson Editor, Signature Press, Berkeley, CA
2906 Forest Ave., Berkeley, CA 94705 www.signaturepress.com
(510) 540-6538; fax, (510) 540-1937; e-mail, thompson@...
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