I'm working on a Tichy PFE Reefer and I was wondering if there was an off the shelf paint for the sides and ends. Tichy's instructions call for blends of Daylight Orange & RG Yellow for the sides; BCR &Tuscan red for the ends, icing platforms, roofwalk(sic) and fascia.

The car will be run on a post WW2 layout, FWIW.

Ken O'Brien

Ken O'Brien wrote:

I'm working on a Tichy PFE Reefer and I was wondering if there was an off the shelf paint for the sides and ends. Tichy's instructions call for blends of Daylight Orange & RG Yellow for the sides; BCR &Tuscan red for the ends, icing platforms, roofwalk(sic) and fascia.

Freshly painted, the cars were Daylight Orange on the sides, but this faded in the direction of yellow, so Tichy's suggestion is for a weathered color. The ends and roof color sound like the pre-1942 scheme with black roof sheets, not for a postwar paint scheme. The "BCR and Tuscan" suggestion is hard to evaluate, as different paint makers have quite different ideas about what is Tuscan. There is a paint chip for each of the original BCR and Orange colors in the PFE book.

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@...
Publishers of books on railroad history

I built this kit a couple of years ago, painted all sub-assemblies with off-the-shelf paints from spray cans, without masking. Orange was Model Master "Go Mango 1969-70" (different from plain "Go Mango"), red was Tamiya Red Brown, underframe was a Tamiya black (either "Black" or "Matt Black", I don't recall which). I've posted the results, pending approval, to an album entitled "PFE R-40-4".

Al Brown, Melbourne, Fla.

Dick Harley at Naperville had many PFE reefers on display; he prefers the P-B-L "Star" brand
color for PFE orange to others. The Tru-Color to my eye seems a tiny bit off, but in the past I've
mixed my own colors. If you're modeling a car with a 3 or 4 year old paint job it hardly matters,
as these cars got dirty fast.

John Riddell had a good idea that I'm going to try. Just stick a 'popsicle stick' into each color
and let it dry. (I will use white styrene strips.) And label it... Then you'll have a ready supply of
colored strips to match to drift cards, photos, models, whatever.

Tim O'Connor

IMO, just about any shade of orange will work if you are modeling a train of PFE reefers as they appeared in the "wild". There are many color photos of such trains and the number of different colors...due to weather, sun and age...is significant. When I modeled Tichy reefers I probably used Floquil. Today I would use Polyscale.

Mike Brock



Dick Harley at Naperville had many PFE reefers on display; he prefers the P-B-L "Star" brand
color for PFE orange to others. The Tru-Color to my eye seems a tiny bit off, but in the past I've
mixed my own colors. If you're modeling a car with a 3 or 4 year old paint job it hardly matters,
as these cars got dirty fast.

John Riddell had a good idea that I'm going to try. Just stick a 'popsicle stick' into each color
and let it dry. (I will use white styrene strips.) And label it... Then you'll have a ready supply of
colored strips to match to drift cards, photos, models, whatever.

Tim O'Connor

If you refer to photos of Erie's steam era fast freight trains (Locomotive Quarterly had some nice ones from Bob Collins) you will a lot of variation in the color of PFE reefers. Some are dark and some are very light.

I have found color photos of PFE ice reefers where the basic color has faded to yellow but the freshly painted repack area is definately daylight orange.

I recall Tony's book saying that some years PFE washed their reefers at least several times a year. Perhaps chemicals used in washing helped lighten the orange to yellow (Champ said PFE reefers were painted yellow; at one time I thought this meant school bus yellow {yellow with a little bit of orange}).

The dark reefers are easy to explain. Erie had a tunnel (Otisville tunnel?) not too far from the eastern end and under certain conditions
trains would receive a heavy coating of soot.

Tony has a color photo of wood side PFE reefers on float in New York
harbor and they all look to be similar dusty daylight orange.

I wonder about the color of MDT reefers in the '40s. Roger's book says orange but there are some Jack Delano photos of MDT wood reefers assigned to IC taken during WWII where the side color is definitely lemon yellow (no red at all).

Ed Mines

Ed Mines writes about PFE reefers:

The dark reefers are easy to explain. Erie had a tunnel (Otisville tunnel?) not too far from the eastern end and under certain conditions
trains would receive a heavy coating of soot."

Easier than that. The book Union Pacific Steam In Color has several photos of PFE reefer trains. Those on pgs 111 and 112 are perhaps most enlightening...or perhaps "darkening" would be a better term. The photo on pg 89 shows 3 PFE reefers...the middle one obviously has a coat of orange paint. The other two could have been painted with just about any shade of brown. The photo on pg 112 shows a lengthy train of PFE reefers which show at least 5 different shades of orange. The original paint? Well, since I was not there when they were painted I can't say for sure one way or other but I would speculate that all had the same original paint mix. Add tunnels and snow sheds on the SP and Altamont tunnel and Hermosa tunnel on the UP...not to mention tons of cinders and smoke from a variety of steam locos in the open air. And, yes, from personal experience, smoke tends to blow sideways in Wyoming...not to mention locations in the Great Plains. So...while Erie tunnels might have contributed, they need not have bothered. UP and SP had the weathering function well in hand long before reaching the Mississippi.

Mike Brock

M, Ed Mines wrote:

If you refer to photos of Erie's steam era fast freight trains (Locomotive Quarterly had some nice ones from Bob Collins) you will a lot of variation in the color of PFE reefers. Some are dark and some are very light.
I have found color photos of PFE ice reefers where the basic color has faded to yellow but the freshly painted repack area is definately daylight orange.

Many, many color photos show this color variation (also true for most other reefer owners). The PFE orange definitely did fade to yellow in a very superficial surface layer, and in old cars I have examined close up, can almost be brushed off. I would think washing would REMOVE that surface layer.

Champ said PFE reefers were painted yellow; at one time I thought this meant school bus yellow {yellow with a little bit of orange}.

Champ is responsible for MANY color scheme errors (or maybe just imaginative ones), so this is no surprise. I have talked about PFE reefer color variation in several clinics, and in posts on my blog, if anyone wishes to pursue it further..


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@...
Publishers of books on railroad history