A few weeks ago I bought a used Mikado that had a custom paint job. The cab roof was painted red. It looks great and I’ve always admired model steam engines with the red roof.
Question: Over the years, I’ve looked at a lot of photos and videos of steam locos and have not seen a “real” one with a red roof. Did any of the midwest and eastern roads paint the roofs red on their steam power? As I repaint and letter my steam fleet for my free-lanced road, I can’t make up my mind about the red roofs.
Definitely the PRR did along with the tender deck. Reason you haven’t seen it is because after a time it turned black from the coal smoke and cinder fallout. Another reason is that most of the photography was in black and white so the colors don;t show up.
Besides the Pennsy, the IC painted their cab roofs a reddish color. Of course, as said above, the only time you actually SAW the red paint was when the engine was brand new. I’ve had several IC fans get REALLY mad at me for mentioning the red roofs, until I showed them color proof!
Great Northern engines - at least ones with the green boilers - had red roofs. From what I’ve been able to see/read, it seems like many many railroads used red roofs (usually a lt. tuscan red) on the cab roofs. It’s possible it was in fact more common to have a red roof than not??
I’ve heard that some roads left the cab roofs in primer, rather than painting them. Since you can’t see the roof–at least from the ground–they didn’t paint them. Another theory was, that the red paint made rust less visible.
It could be that the red was the primer paint, I seem to remember seeing an engine being restored where it was painted red. About the color of (Floquil??) Zinc Chromate primer.
There’s a very durable rusty red paint that was popular for many years for boxcars (and barns) that was dirt cheap because it was made from…dirt !! Well actually from clay or other soil containing iron ore. I think in the NE it’s called “putty”, if Norm Abrams is to be believed. [:D]
As I recall the boxcar red and red oxide primers were lead based and as such extremely durable and resitant to rust and acid which coal smoke generated.
Sounds good to me. In my mind’s eye, I envision the top surfaces of the loco with a liberal covering of coal soot and grime front to back, heavy down the center third of the roof maybe, with varying amounts of red showing on the roof side surfaces; and no two locos looking exactly alike. What do you think?
Southern Pacific also had some, 0-6-0’s, 4-8-0’s were the most common, but a single MT2 also sported a red roof, in the era a special paint from about 1920 to 1930, it was never a system standard. There were exceptions to the above,
Several switchers with red painted roofs survived into the post war years until replaced with diesels, these were assigned to passenger switching.
Actually, modern paints are FAR more durable than any steam-era paint, which was turpentine-based. Lead was a pigment fixative more than anything else.
Old paints wore out FAST. Freight cars were regularly repainted, say every 7-10 years, not because the roads took pride in their appearance, but because they wanted to keep the elements off their expensive equipment. Old paint chalked and flaked quickly, meaning that it didn’t do it’s job well. The SP’s entire freight car roster was repainted twice between 1950 and 1960!
“Boxcar red” is just iron oxide (rust) and the turpentine base. Until white paint became extremely cheap in the 1920s, it was the cheapest paint around (even cheaper than black), which is why so much of the world was painted in that color: freight cars, railroad structures, barns, etc - anything that needed the weather kept off the surface wood, but which didn’t warrant anything expensive.
Once DuPont perfected it’s first weather-resistant paint, railroads jumped on it. While more expensive than traditional paint, the cars didn’t have to be repainted as often. Railroads basically stopped repainting freight cars because the paint was still sound. That’s why you still see cars with 30 year old paint jobs today, something that would have NEVER been seen in the steam era.
Well I don’t think anyone said that “natural” paints like oxide red were better than modern synthetic paints. But for the time, that paint was much more durable than other paints available, and so got used a lot.
BTW synthetic paints were first created in 1859 in Germany. Before that, the cost of a color of paint was connected directly to what natural item you had to use to create it - if you wanted a nice purple you had to use something like squid ink which was pretty hard to come by and hence only really rich people could afford. (Hence, purple became a royal color because you had to be a king to afford it.) For dark blue, you had to use wode (a plant) etc. etc. You could make oxide red paint very cheaply - turpentine and red dirt basically.
Once synthetic paint became available, the Victorians went nuts with all the cheap colors, and began painting their houses 11 different colors. Exorbitant color schemes became popular on trains too, but eventually calmed down with Pullman Green etc.
That’s the way to go. But I might mention that the black “gunge” on the top of steam locos is not just soot - the oil used to lubricate valve chests, cylinders, the steam end of the air compressor, and the turbo-generator also gets exhausted and lands all over the loco. Oily deposits on the running boards/footplate were very noticeable after a run on the loco I used to fire.
Okay, Pennsy, WM, IC, and some Great Northern engines had red oxide steam locomotive roofs. For all those who never got west of Chi-town, here’s another major red roof road: the Chicago, Burlington & Quincy. The “Burli-Q” and its subsidiaries, the Colorado & Southern and the Fort Worth and Denver, were all red heads. C&S 2-8-0 No. 641, the last steam locomotive in regular operation, in 1962, between Leadville and Climax, Colo., was well documented in color images.
Was it only the roofs that were painted red on various steam locomotives? Maybe its my imagination, but I seem to recall seeing pictures of steam locomotives that had the entire exterior of the cabs painted red – or at least on the sides as well as the roof. Was that not so? Am I imagining, or not?
In any case, I chose to paint the sides and roofs of all my steam locomotives with Pennsy maroon red to provide a family look to my Harper Valley Railway.
I’m old enuf to know. The paint is ‘red lead’ your basic enamel primer in pre- EPA years. Now, of all the relatively thin metal (not much) on a steamer, the one part you don’t want to rust through is,the freakin’ roof over yer head. It got painted far more often than any other place and was often painted between shoppings with red lead.
Even roads like the CPR, fastidious to the end, had occasional units that didn’t quite get around to a top coat of black. Some roads made it a style, some, PRR for example specified red lead for all “important” upper surfaces and left it at that.
Without red lead, steel hulled ships would have gone away faster than Jaguar cars on the Atlantic coast!
Now, like so much else, it’s illegal…children might chew it you know.
Oh. by the way, it’s rather an orangey brown out of the can, it goes browner with UV exposure and our old friend carbon soot.
If my memory is correct, the cab roofs of the steamers used in the Rouge Complex of the Ford Motor Company were painted red. The reason is lost in time.
There were a couple of railroads that had locomotives that were largely painted red, I think the GM&O had a couple for one of their passenger trains??
I wouldn’t be surprised if more than half of all steam engines had red roofs of one shade or another, it was very very common. I seem to remember Trains or R’n’R or somebody doing an article on designing the first generation diesel paint schemes, the author said something like “Designing a “paint scheme” for a steam engine was easy - just tell the builder to give it a red roof and maybe a red top to the tender, silver graphite on the smokebox and firebox, white numbers on the cab side and the railroad name in white on the side of the tender. Everything else - black.”