I’m planning to put together 3 MDC old-time truss rod cabeese tonight. There are a couple of parts that are black that I don’t think should be: The roof walk, the latdders and the tool boxes. Should they be?
Black?
The color of the body?
SP Daylight Red
CN Orange
G&D Red
Possibly, and probably choice #1 for the roofs. Most roads tarred their wood roofs, or painted them with something called “asphaltum paint” If you’re tarring the roof, you might as well tar the running boards (their correct name) too, since tarring will make them less slick when wet. Of course, if the boards are black, the roof should be too. Most grabirons were painted black (except for the stuff that needed to be high visibility, but that was after 1909, and your layout is set before that), so your ladders should be black too. Rule of thumb on old cars: eveything metal should be either the color of the body or black. On caboose, most metal was black.
Only if the roof is the same color as the body, which was pretty rare on non-steel roofs. The tool box should be the color of the body (but tool boxes are actually pretty rare on cabooses in general)
The ladders shouldn’t be wood, so that’s a non-issue. The tool boxes shouldn’t be natural wood, since untreated wood rots. As for the running boards, well…they CAN be natural, especially a single board that’s supposed to represent a replacement board. But Victorian train crews were pretty proud of their hacks, so they’d have made sure that any repair was properly painted.