I’ve nearly finished decorating an Athearn HW Observation car in SAL shadowline paint.
I’m using Micro-Scale decals designed to decorate Santa Fe cars for the shadowlines on the SAL car - I have SAL decals for all of the rest.(Thank you for the heads-up, Andy). I notice in the Micro-Scale instruction sheet that in late 1949, Santa Fe painted the roofs of their shadowlined cars black - I model in 1949.
Here is the question: Did the SAL also paint the roofs of their HW shadowline cars black?
To ad further confusion there is included on page 79 in the book, “By Streamliner, New York to Florida” are two shadowline HW cars as operated by the SAL circa 1950. Would the inclusion of these cars with silver painted roofs suggest a definitive answer to my question?[%-)]
I do not have a definitive answer for you but I serioulsy doubt they would shadow line the roof. the idea was to make the car look corrugated like the new stainless steel cars. Unless the cars the SAL has did have corrugated roofs it would be highly unlikely in my opinion. Even then I don’t think they would go to that effort. The PRR did not do roofs to the best of my knowledge as they were black anyway. The SAL might have followed the same coloring as the PRR.
Thank you - ndbprr. for this information. I guess that it may be a difficult question I have sought an answer to.
The SAL cars whose photos I saw in the “Streamliner” book had plain silver roofs and only the car’s sides were shadow lined - not the roof. Apparently, the Santa Fe shadowlined cars started out with plain silver roofs, but latter painted these roofs black because they encountered difficulties in keeping the silver car roofs clean. I was wondering if the SAL encountered similar problems of keeping the roofs of their cars clean and so, like the Sante Fe, re-painted their cars plain silver painted roofs black.
Hi Bruce, The MicroScale instructions must be in error, because the Santa Fe did not repaint the roofs of shadow-lined cars from aluminum (silver) to black while the cars remained in the shadow-line scheme. When Santa Fe shadow-lined cars were repainted to either two-tone or solid gray, many were repainted with black roofs, but some still had aluminum roofs. While the Santa Fe abandoned the shadow-line scheme on revenue-service cars after about five years, the heavyweight business cars that were shadow-lined remained in that scheme until they were retired, and their roofs were always aluminum. So long, Andy