What is a good model color match for a new 1940’s box car? The one photo I have seen looks more brown than I would have thought.
Hi Joe, and [#welcome] to the Forums.
There are so many versions of so-called “boxcar red” (both prototype and model) that you almost can’t go wrong (or conversely, haven’t got a hope of getting it right [(-D] ). Floquil, Scalecoat, and PollyScale all offer at least one version of boxcar red, freight car brown, or something similar. I’d suggest you pick the one that looks closest to your eye and either go with it as-is, or modify it to suit. Unless I’m painting something that requires a very specific match, I seldom use any colour right out of the bottle. (CNR green passenger cars are a good example of paint that I don’t alter: I use Accupaint CNR Green #11, but there are other brands of CNR Green #11 that look very similar, although side-by-side, the differences are usually noticeable.) For freight cars, I often mix red, orange, brown, or even black into a stock “boxcar red” or “freight car brown”, and also alter the mix as I go on to subsequent cars - this is for both cars from the same road and cars from different ones. Some roads, like Pennsy and the B&O, had their own distinct version of “boxcar red” and I try to replicate that where possible. However, I don’t model either of those roads, so I go with what looks acceptable to my eye and call it “good enough” - Pennsy and B&O purists may disagree, of course. [swg]
Except for the NYC car, the cars shown below are all meant to represent ones that are either almost new or less than a couple of years old. None is the same colour.
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Steam era boxcars also tended to get darker as they aged and weathered from soot and smoke from the steam engines. Also, natural inorganic paint pigments like iron oxide were less prone to fading in the sun than modern paints.