Painting Passenger Cars?

Model Railroader General Discussion (Model Railroader)
1

I have a set of four old time passenger cars that I am going to need to paint in UP colors. Here is a pic of what I am wanting to accomplish:

I will not be doing the interiors and would like to tint the windows, I have used a black or green magic marker with some success. I know the sides are to be UP Armor Yellow but I do not know about the color of the top. I will probly make the decals from my Testors Decal Maker.

For the questions, What color do you think the top should be?

Shouldn’t the numbers be different on each car?

What are some good ideas for tinting the windows?

Any suggestions would be appriciated as I have never tried to put a kit together, and have done very few painting cars that I am satisified with. Thanks, Mike

2

Those are some NICE seats…send them to me if you dont want to use them.

UP Passenger Cars= Armour Yellow sides, Grey Roof.

David B

3

Those seats are from Palace Car Company. I think they produce some of the best interiors, although they may not be the most prototypical.

4

Good David, I do not have the interiors. If I had them I would certainly put them in. Thanks anyway. Mike

5

The accepted grey is known as Harbor Mist, but consider that this grey varied from light to dark, even on freshly painted cars. My advice is to vary the grey per car, also you may wish to lighten the Armour Yellow a bit with some white, personally it has too much of a mustard tone for my taste. Decals should be the least of your concerns, at least in the popular scales. For a period, from the mid twenties to mid thrities, certain classes of passenger equiptment bore Bronze Leaf lettering and Chocolate brown roofs and underframes, economics and premature wear soon caused UP to seek out a more cost effective scheme, hence the adoption of grey and yellow…(true credit belongs to Pullman Standard ). Now, about that UP Postal storage car painted aluminum with Armour Yellow letter board, that was a one-off experiment that was never adopted.

Best of luck

Dave

6

The early UP Armor Yellow cars had BROWN roofs, as per the M1000! I believe “roof brown” would be close.[:)]

7

Were the Harriman cars ever painted in any of the Armor Yellow schemes? I would’ve thought that U.P.'s version of Pullman green or the double grey Challenger scheme would’ve been more appropriate, athough I’m not a U.P. modeller. Of course, anyone is free to paint whatever scheme they like. [swg]

Wayne