I would like to give my UP diesel and caboose a light weathering. An all photos available of the 50th, 60th and 70th they are at least in fair condition. Most are in good to very good condition. I assume a lots of dirt and rust are the wrong way to go.
On the other hand my UP diesel and caboose are very bright yellow spots on the layout. That looks somehow overdone.
http://www.uprr.com/aboutup/history/index.shtml is the Union Pacific site. They have many photos of everything from the 1860’s to today. UP has traditionally been pretty good on maintenance & washing equipment - especially locos & crummies.[:)]
A thin wash of white should tone down the yellow enough t make it look realistic without excessive weathering. As always, practice on an old piece before trying it on your good equipment.
Tom
Now CSX, on the other hand…[:-^]
If you’re modeling the period when the UP had both locomotives and cabooses, they were pretty good about keeping the equipment reasonably clean. The thing about UP Armour Yellow is it came in about 20 different shades from a pale to a very bright yellow. Five units in the same train would all look different in the sun. If you want to imitate the pale yellow look, either because that was the color or through weathering, that diluted white wash would work. However, some of the engines were very bright yellow so I wouldn’t do it to every engine. The weathering was really dependent on where the locomotives were assigned. LA to Salt Lake engines tended to get a fine layer of reddish dust on the trucks and parts of the engines where the trucks threw up debris. They also faded a lot faster, especially the grey roofs, which could look almost like a dirty white after a few years in the desert. Midwestern units tended to be more streaked with faint black on the sides from the rain washing carbon deposits from the roofs and the silver stucks got a rusty look quicker. Compared to a road like the GM&O, which appeared to have gangs of men assigned to throw dirt on their locos, the UP ran a very clean operation. [:)]
One suggestion I may offer is to take a gander at Ed Austins’s “Union Pacific Diesels” Vol I 1934-1959 (don’t have vol II so…) It has many, many FULL color photos that show some great detail… and even many of the late steam - in color too! I only have a few books on UP, so it’s not like I have everything out there (YET!). However, for all the loco photos, there are only two shots showing a full caboose. But like UP2CSX said, this is one road that kept a very clean house.
The Onion Specific is rather meticulous in its public image and its locomotive fleet is kept in rather clean slate; however keep in mind that it does run through some rather ‘dirty’ areas - I have encountered more than one dust storm on the transcon across southern Wyoming and Nebraska and have observed both eastbound and westbound freights arriving at Cheyenne in a rather poorly polished condition.
The Onion Specific is a fast railroad - one might conjecture that they invented fast freight - and I have seen consists coming out of a blizzard atop Monida Pass on the Idaho-Montana border and sometimes it appeared that the lead unit was the cleanest of the bunch. Just as the rear window in your car will get dirty passing through a rainstorm if you do not have a spoiler to break up the vacuum the same thing happens with the passage of a train; the dirt kicked up from the trucks gets sucked into the gap between units on a multi-unit consist and really mucks up the unit(s) behind. It doesn’t take many hours of road service for the sheen of a recent washing wears off.