If you click on the link below, the first page of their new catalogue has the Empire State Express Hudson, if you scroll down to the last page it has the 1938 Twentieth Century Ltd. Hudson. (They’re also in the inside of course too!!)
Anyway, to me it did look like the gray was too dark, but looking back at some other books with color pics it looks like it’s not too bad…maybe a little dark but pretty close. It could be that earlier models were just too light a gray, like the Rivarossi Hudson…which by the way I wouldn’t mind someone reissuing in an improved version. They were kinda light but the later ones ran pretty well as I recall.
I do still think the tender striping is about a scale foot or more too high though. Perhaps their new NYC passenger cars ride a little high and they had to change the striping on the tender so it matched?? [xx(]
It does not seem probable that BLI will offer any passenger cars for their Dreyfuss Hudson since MTH has already announced them and will probably flood the market with the sets. Looking at the pictures of the different passenger cars, it might be a good thing that MTH is making them available. I certainly hope BLI will continue to work on the Dreyfuss Hudson since it is a brass hybrid.
To follow up my earlier post, I dug out the 1988 Model Railroader with the cover story on doing an N-trak module of the NYC Hudson River line, and a big foldout on the 1938 streamlined 20th Century.
According to the color diagrams, it does look like the grays used by MTH are correct, the engines and cars really were darker than I thought.
However, the striping on the tender is still wrong, in fact the striping on the MTH engine is actually more incorrect than I thought!! As I noted, I can only guess they did it to match the cars, which apparently ride pretty high - or maybe the pic was just a “preproduction model” and the real ones will be OK??