Right out of the box, most models are shiny black which doesn’t seem realistic. However, most of the weathered steamers I see are streaky with light and medium shades of gray. The photos I’ve seen of real steamers don’t seem to show that level of weathering although since most of the photos are black and white, maybe the weathering doesn’t show up that well in photos. The locos still look a flat black in photos.
Why are some cab roofs painted oxide red?
I see this done mostly with models of Pennsy steamers although I’ve seen it done on other roadnames as well. I have two BLI Pennsy steamers painted that way, a Pacific and a Mountain. I just bought a Bachmann Spectrum Pennsy Pacific and its roof is black like most of the other steamers on my roster. If both of these Pacifics are correct, what is the reason that some were painted red and others were not? I don’t recall seeing a prototype steamer with a red roof but again, due to most steamer photos being black and white, it probably wouldn’t be obvious if it was red.
Locomotives got filthy remarkably quickly, and required repeated and fairly intensive cleaning to look good. The trick, perhaps, is to understand where the different sources of schmutz are coming from – soot, road dust, boiler chemicals, various types of total-loss lubrication, rust – and carefully apply weathering effects proportional to the locomotive’s putative ‘state in service’.
We had a discussion a couple of years ago about a picture of a NYC Dreyfuss Hudson after arriving in Chicago during wartime – the thing looked almost hopelessly bedraggled, but whether this was ‘normal’ for that time of year or the result of deferred ‘aesthetic’ maintenance, we didn’t really know. I doubt anyone with a Dreyfuss Hudson would weather it that way by choice, or much enjoy it if they did…
The critical thing is the light-tan road dust on the lower running gear. In my opinion that’t the single most important thing to replicate. Don’t get carried away trying to weather grease, rust, etc. until you have that detail first, or it just looks like you pulled the locomotive out of the trash somewhere… ;-}
Railroad preference. In some cases this might have been done to simplify keeping them from rusting with near-continual sulfurous cinders and soot falling on them, by allowing simple cleaning and a coat of boxcar red. Note that PRR sometimes used
Prior to 1940, PRR practice was to paint cab roofs and tender decks Oxide Red. In 1940, Philadelphia issued instructions to discontinue the practice in favor of black on locomotives when they were painted after shopping, so black roofs gradually came to dominate. Still, not a few went to the scrap yard still having red roofed cabs and I would not be at all surprised that some were still hanging on when PRR steam died in 1956.
I recall seeing lots of over-weathered steamers in long ago issues of both MR and RMC.
At one time, there were lots of them with vertical grey streaks down the sides of both the boilers and the tenders, but I never understood why that was supposedly prototypical. Very few of the real locomotives that I saw ever had those streaks (or at least so many streaks) with no sign of what would have caused them.
I generally do weather my steamers, but most of them have what you might consider as “recently out of the shops”, rather than “heading for the scrappers”.
Here are a few…
…both have some dirt and dust on the running gear, and discolouration on both the smoke boxes and the the fire boxes, caused by heat…
I have five of these Athearn Genesis Mikados (and a couple more under construction), and all weathered similarly to the 10 Wheelers…
I’d guess that many would consider them too pristine, but I’m in the process of adding feedwater heaters to all of them, which will require some paint touch-ups…
This one was painted and weathered for a friend, who wanted it to look like it was on it’s last legs. I started out adding the dirt and grime lightly, but was encouraged by the owner to keep adding more…
I’d like to see the original photograph the artist used – he made a relatively crude ink-drawing overlay over the original details and shading, but didn’t touch the original (filtered) clouds in the sky…
Hey, Ed! Put up some pictures of the ‘worst’ of the 5001/5011s and J1s used on the Sandusky ore trains, in the mid-Fifties – that will show them where and how the water-treatment staining showed up. (Later T1 pictures, after 1948, increasingly show the same sort of thing, complicated by the fallout from the burning-of-Rome smoke effects (to quote Lucius Beebe) and the poor crews discovered quickly that the aerodynamics sucked that smoke down and neatly through the cab ventilators, where it quickkly transformed them to look like refugees from a coal mine… )
Thanks, Wayne. That’s kind of what I suspected when I asked the question. I think it was back in the 1980s that I first saw an example of a heavily weathered, gray streaked loco in one of the magazines and my first reaction was it didn’t look like any pictures of real steamers I’ve seen. Since then, I’ve seen many examples of similarly weathered steamers and it has never looked right to me.
Like you, I’ve done mostly light weathering on my steamers, just enough to make it look like they didn’t just come out of the paint shop.
PS. I always enjoy seeing the modifications you do to both your locos and rolling stock.
CN 1395 is still around today, stored outdoors on the Coopersville & Marne Railway in Michigan.
Here’s a similar engine showing a lot of scale buildup from the blowdown outlet back to the tender. An oil burner would probably also have some vertical black streaks running down the tender from spills during refuelling.
An additional point about weathering in general. My real world observations of trains suggests that except for equipment in extremely neglected condition, the farther away you are, the less noticable the effects of dirt and rust are.
These are 1/87th scale models, often viewed from 3 feet away or more. It does not take a lot of weathering to get a realistic effect at 250 or 350 scale feet away.
This B&O EL 2-8-8-0 shows just a bit of lime “streak” from just below the whistle plus some buildup around the drifting valves. The smokebox shows more streaking and this is the results of valve oil deposits more than soot and cinders which are easily blown off or washed away by rain water.
Weathering of steam can be greatly influenced by the available fuels and water qualities in a specific area or railroad. Poor water quality resulted in considerable whitish deposits near any steam leak or exhaust, blow down, safety valve, whistle or cylinder cocks.
I’m working up my nerve to start weathering a BLI PRR L1s. That will be followed by weathering a BLI PRR I1sa. My aim is to weather them as though they were fairly clean at the beginning of their current run. I’m anticipating a problem with the ‘pop’ valves.
The ‘pop’ or safety values on top of the firebox on both engines are a fairly shiny brass. This just doesn’t look right to me, regardless of weathering. I somehow doubt PRR would have kept those valves shiny brass. Am I wrong? What should they look like?
Sometimes I can still see a hint of brass color in the bell and occasionally a tarnished brass look to the whistle. Depends on how recently the locomotive was shopped. Steam engines had a boiler wash every thirty days (that’s the inside of the boiler not the outside). I’m sure if time permitted, which usually it did not, the jacket may have been steamed off and perhaps wiped down with the oily waste.
Running gear was steamed off and if left unprotected would take on a rusty appearance until the road grime and valve gear, side rod lube got a chance to cover it over again.
When the site is working, John Dziobko, Jr. (recently passed) has some excellent color photos of steam and particularly good ones of PRR steam and early Diesels:
Thanks, Ed, particularly for the color, high-angle photo of PRR 4318. I haven’t seen many good color photos of steam and few of those are from high enough to be useful for modelers.
I think I’ll try to mix up a dirty, slightly corroded bronze colored paint - dark gray with a hint of green for the pop valves, whistles and bells.
Speaking of locomotive bells, have you ever seen one, steam or Diesel, that wasn’t painted bright red inside? I haven’t. I’d paint the bells on my engines that way but they don’t move and you can’t see the inside.
It also really depends on the era and nature of your railroad.
For example, branchline, shortline, and depression era railroading tended to be a lot dirtier.
Here’s pictures of twin locomotives from my prototype, Copper Range #100 and #101 in the late depression era.
The road dust is pretty severe, worse on #100 than #101, but nearly wipes out the road name on the tender of both. The firebox is very grimy as well, and you can detect some of the scaling on the boilers, though since the film is lower quality and B+W it’s harder to tell. The only parts on the locomotive that are clean are much clearer on the pictures of #100 - anyplace where there’s metal-on-metal contact. While those locations in part cleaned themselves through contact, no good railroad would have let them get into a state of even minor disrepair - if you did your locomotive would start falling apart.
My general rule of thumb is that understanding what different parts did, and the benefit of cleaning them, is key to weathering. Since the railroads did a cost benefit analysis to whether or not each part was clean. The stuff that has to be cleaned shouldn’t be weathered. A hot shot passenger train would obviously be cleaned much more: PRR cleaned it’s T1s every day for instance. Mainline service gets cleaned less down to branchline the least. And each railroad has a different emphasis on the prestige of the locomotives and the financial means to do cleaning.
It seems that the copper range didn’t have the resources to clean under the view of management!
Great photos, Ed but I was a bit confused by this caption. Worthington is a suburb on the north side of Columbus. The Norfolk and Western and New York Central’s Big Four had parallel tracks on the east side of Worthington. Pennsy’s Cleveland, Akron, Columbus Railroad went northeast of out of Columbus. I did some reading and learned they also had the Sandusky Branch that went due north out of Columbus and I’m guessing it shared the right of way with the NYC and N&W. My family moved to Columbus in 1966, shortly before the Penn Central merger and my only recollection was of PC diesels on that line which was less than a mile east of our house.
No, he took a photo of a retired old unit that’s been rusting away for years, and ran it through some extreme high-dynamic range HDR image processing which accentuates the colour contrast to an extreme degree and then grayscaled it.
The result is a very unnatural looking image.
And as Dave H. mentioned above, a whole bunch of missing parts, lagging, and jacketing are another sign this is not a working unit. It’s a modern digital photo of a unit in a museum collection.
I can recall seeing photos of long lines of soon to be scrapped Milwaukee Road steam locomotives and they looked remarkably dark black and in good shape, more so than similar photos of C&NW steam locomotives looked. Ironically the streamlined steam locomotives of the Milwaukee Road painted in colors other than black looked pretty bedraggled even when still in service in the final years, and it seems very few Milwaukee Road modelers want to capture that look.
There used to be an exceptional modeler and photographer named Paul Jansen, who took photos for the PFM catalog, and he was known for adding quite a bit of gray when he painted a brass locomotive to bring out the details when it was being photographed (anyone who has tried to take a good photo of a prototype steam locomotive which is in fresh paint such as the UP Big Boy knows how tough it is to capture any details - the black just seem to suck up all the light). When weathering was added in addition to that it really made some of Jansen’s models look like a flock of pigeons had just flown over, as nothing was black or even close to black. Even at the time people objected that Jansen was prone to going overboard.
Another well known modeler of the 1960s who weathered his steam locomotives was John Gascoyne. Gascoyne was known for painting on “highlights” so that the details would “pop” on his models but when photographed it looked odd and over-weathered.
This is just my theory and like most blanket statements I am sure many exceptions can be found, but I think realistic weathering of steam locomotives became a “thing” when the two popular model railroad magazines started to print photos mostly in color. Weathering effects that looked OK in black and white photography did not look so good when photographed in color.
Much has been documented in the PRR circles about operations on the Sandusky Branch, John. I have quite a few of these resources, the PRRT&H Keystone plus many of the books written, one of the latest being Conquest II by David W. Messer.
I used to “railfan” in Marion, Oh. which was quite a mecca in its day and the Sandusky branch bisected the station platform there. By then it was already turned over to the N&W.
My dad used to take me to the railroad museum there as well as the Warther Museum in Dover.
Many of the locomotive builders of the day would specially paint a locomotive in gray or at least give an overspray in some type of lighter shade in order for details to show. Sometimes you could see evidence of white panels being placed behind the sub
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