OK I’m getting closer to settling on a set of colors for my railroads paint scheme, I am thinking of using ERIE D. And L. Greens and SOUTHERN green, the question is will I be able to “get away with” using another railroads paints?
Steven:
It’s your railroad. You can do whatever you want! No need for permission. No need to apologise. Just do it!
Cheers!!
Dave
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I do not understand the question or concern. What are your worries with using green? Please ellaborate.
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-Kevin
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Why are you green with envy? What are you jealous of? [*-)]
It’s a model (toy) railroad. Paint them pink if you want.
No. Every MRRer and his grandmother will know you used those colors and the color-scheme will be a faux pas of epic proportions. [:o)]
Go with it, Mr. Nike…
I second the motion of use whatever paint scheme you want to use. It is your money and your railroad.
Yes, you cna get away with this, because despite the specific examples you listed, there are plenty where multiple railroads used the same color (but maybe called it something different). The key is going back to the paint manufacturer - there aren’t an infinite number of them, and there weren’t back then. Many of those railroad colors would have a code number in DuPont, or Sherwin-Williams. Even a single railroad could use different suppliers at different times, leading to slightly different shades of the ‘same’ color, and due to slight differences in the composition, different weathering over time.
SO pick whatever colors appeal to you, just don’t do what I did when I was 8 or 9 and go with colors that are too garish. I used the colors of my elementary school as my railroad colors, a bright blue and gold (yellow). I painted one loco and one passenger car and it was neat for about 10 minutes, then I began to regret it. Dulled out, the blue probbaly would have been OK, it was like the darker blue Sante Fe used, but out of the can shiny it was bad. ANd the yellow, no amount of dullcote woould have fixed that. It’s like the roof of the loco cab and car were one solid safety stripe. Oh, and I painted the loco underframe and the car trucks silver. Hey, I was like 8.
–Randy
I know for a fact that EMD’s sales department referred to other company colors in their pitches to customers. When the Bellefonte Central, a very small railroad in Central PA, ordered its first diesel unit, the sales agent recommended NYO&W gray with a Southern green stripe.
To clarify, 1 the title of the thread has nothing to do with anything, I was just trying to be creative, 2 I was wanting to know if I could use paint that was used by another railroad. And not be thought of as a copy cat.
Modeling means being a copycat to some extent, doesn’t it? Just what fussy visitor are you trying to keep so happy?
I doubt if many folks have a particular railroad’s green so embedded in their memory that they could look and say “ooh you have mixed Reading green with Chicago & North Western green there.” Indoor lighting changes everything anyway, as I well know from looking at my authentic C&NW trust plate, painted genuine C&NW green by no less than the C&NW itself, and compare that to what Floquil and other makes called “C&NW green.”
Using a particular prototype’s “green” might be one way to have a good chance that that green or some version of it will be available and will match, or almost, for years to come. Mixing your own green or finding a non railroad green to use might make future color matches a real challenge.
Dave Nelson
Why? It just adds confusion to the discussion. The title should be relevant to the question.
OK got it I can use other railroads paint colors, thanks.
I found this site, http://www.myperfectcolor.com
All I have to do is get OE paint codes.
IIRC, back when the Florida East Coast used a red and yellow scheme, I believe it was a combo of UP Yellow and Santa Fe Red.
Well, if you consider that most model railroad paints are labelled as specific railroad colours, it would be difficult to not use another railroad’s colours. Unless I’m painting a model to represent one belonging to a specific railroad, I seldom pay much attention to the name on the bottle, and instead, look at the colour. And in some cases, I’ll custom mix colours to match specific prototype colours if I’m not all that impressed by what’s commercially available.
I painted this locomotive for a friend, whose freelanced road represented a fictional affiliate of the CNR. The paint is CNR Green #11, from SMP, in my opinion, the best representation of the prototype’s colour. The paint scheme and striping (the latter done with leftover SMP Accucals) follows general CNR practices, while the name was done with individual characters…
While the loco above was intended to look CNR-ish, for your locomotive, the colours probably won’t be recognised by most viewers as ones belonging to a specific prototype, especially since you’re drawing from more than one inspiration.
Equally important as the colours is the layout of the colours and separations thereof: are you planning for striping at colour changes? In most cases, even though it’s an additional step, striping simplifies the painting process, as it gives sharp demarcations betwen the colours, and helps to hide minor bleed-unders of paint.
Another consideration to keep in mind is what models you’re painting. Some body styles are best suited to specific styles: F- and E-units generally g
I recently needed to paint some Canadian Pacific items. I looked at all the bottles of airbrush paint I have on the shelf including a few shades of green which is the colour I needed. I had a close but not perfect match, I was not buying yet another bottle of green to cover 1 sq cm of area. If I was entering a modeling contest where the judges walk around with their paint palette chart to check, maybe. Close is good enough and not close is fine if it is a fictitious RR.
Putting things on hold until the perfect piece of the puzzle is acquired is for aerospace, not railways. One only need to look at RR equipment and structures in a time-lapse fashion to realize that the colour chosen to paint something was because it was the paint can closest one to the door of the shed.
Before 1968, Canadian Pacific used maroon as it’s main color on passenger cars. That was because they borrowed it from their US subsidiary, the Soo Line. Soo Line used it because they took control of the Wisconsin Central in 1909, and W.C. used wood passenger cars made of redwood. The cars weren’t painted, just varnished (common in the wooden car days, hence the term “varnish” being used in the old days to refer to passenger trains). Soo painted it’s cars to match the natural redwood color.
Great Northern “Big Sky Blue” is a touch darker than the light blue used by the Rock Island and IIRC L&HR, but all are still pretty close.
In the early days of diesels and streamliners, several railroads used Pullman Green as one of the main colors.
Given the way model paint supplies have dried up over the last few years, you might want to consider using paints you can count on having available. There are even annoying laws about shipping paints to and from some places. I don’t have an airbrush, so I choose most of my paints right off the hardware store rattle can shelf.
I have a couple of diesel switchers that I want to repaint as Milwaukee engines. Finding Milwaukee Orange was very difficult until a small manufacturer around here did a small batch run of their spray cans in that color. I’d literally been looking for years, only to fnd the old standbys like Testors and Floquil out of stock or discontinued. I even bought a number of other orange cans to find a "close enough’ variety, but I was never happy with any of those.
My Moose Bay Transit Authority has no prototype, so I chose a color scheme based on two contrasting colors, one of which was light enough to apply decals to and get the colors close to what I’d printed. Both are hardware store rattle cans, and as I’ve added new trolleys and buses to the fleet, I’ve had no trouble finding the paints again.
The PRR had Brunswick Green.
A lot of other railroads used that same color but called it Black. [:D]
Mr. B makes a good point about availability. Also, I came to regret using model acrylic paint (Rock Island Blue and Midnight Blue) for my freelance St.Paul Route. I chose them just as acrylic model RR paint was becoming available, and didn’t realize the acrylic paint would gum up my fairly expensive internal-mix airbrushes. Eventually I gave up and found the closest colors I could in Tamiya’s spray can line. Their spray cans have a fine nozzle, and deliver a finer spray than the typical ‘rattle can’ paint from a hardware store. Fortunately, blue fades pretty quickly, so I just can explain the difference as being due to weather and time.