Model Railroading > rio grand paint color

Who makes a good color for Rio grand yellow. The badger and Polly scale colors I have are actually orange but called yellow.I am working on DRG&W ML4000's

Maybe try Tru-Color TCP-045 Rio Grande Aspen Gold.  

Both Model-Flex D&RGW Gold and Tru Color D&RGW Aspen Gold are spot on.

Suggested reading first:

http://utahrails.net/drgw/rg-diesel-paint-schemes.php

KM referenced the DRGW color as "orange" and indicated a DuPont paint code of 6479. Sorry I can't translate that to a model equivalent. But with what little I know of Rio Grande paint, the KMs were finished in the more apricot-hued "Aspen Gold" and not the later, more tangerine shade associated with the Anschutz Era and Tunnel Motors. 

The Grande experts above are welcome to cross-check and correct anything I've typed here. Thanks!

~ BZ



Edited 3 time(s). Last edit at 08/26/15 01:36 by Notch16.

Yep, the K-Ms I recall were a different hue, maybe because their paint was formulated in Germany. My DRGW shop paint chip matches well Krylon "School Bus Yellow".

They were painted in Germany. The hue is off. Not so simple to paint.

If I let tru color paint cure for a week, will polly scale or floquil be ok to apply as the next color?

The hue became different quickly, but started out as a match. KM had the color chips, and matched to specs when new; they didn't make anything up or use their own colors for the exteriors. But the synthetic enamel they used at the time did not take kindly to U.S. care conditions, and got chalky quite rapidly, and faded in hue and value. But I believe it started out matched to specs, pretty much same as EMD.

Interesting about the School Bus Yellow equivalent! I have been told that SP Scarlet is also a match for some 1930s GM Auto Engine Block Red. It points to an interesting situation: the origins of what we consider "railroad" colors sometimes issued from elsewhere in the industrial color world. "Daylight Red" and "Socony" (Standard Oil of New York) red being a legendary match, with the S.O. color preceding the railroad's adoption. Or so goes the story...

ML 4000 Kodachrome by the late Roy S. Rittimann, SP Houston Mechanical Dept. Acceptance Officer, taken in October 1961 in Munich just before delivery to the port for shipment to Texas. The gent on the ground is a KM officer, Herr Reinhardt (his Secretary is in the cab) and the man on the steps is Frank Kurz, SP's San Francisco Mechanical Department chief liason for the entire KM program. Photo courtesy Nadine Rittimann Stuth, Roy's daughter.

~ BZ

 



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 08/23/15 17:43 by Notch16.

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That shows an interesting note about the silver band. It looks very much grey. The same grey that is on the roof and nose roof. Was it really a grey before silver? The one picture I have shows just after the rio's went to SP. The body is a match for the Aspen but the plows still hold the orange. I find it interesting that it faded to a close match to the ASPEN COLOR. The as delivered looks a lot like the orange polly scale calls drgw gold.

HB90MACH, it's just the closeup, I think. The silver was specified by KM as "Aluminum" and it looks that way on most other photos.

Pics of the units after coming to the SP are interesting: the patch renumbering and re-lettering shows that the DRGW markings were covered, but the yellow used for the patch blocks doesn't look like it matches DRGW colors. Rio Grande may have painted out their numbers and road name before delivery, but so far there's no photographic evidence of that journey. Maybe Rio Grande painted out their own IDs, or maybe SP did with what paint they had on hand. Although it doesn't look like Armour Yellow or Daylight/PFE Orange, which would have been the two most likely colors for SP paint shops to have nearby.

It's almost futile to try and determine exact colors from early photos of these units -- film stock and age, even with Kodachrome, are all over the map with yellow-orange. The best match is to have another DRGW unit in the frame as a "control" -- unfortunately, the SP 9010 collection doesn't have a lot of those, mostly black-and-whites.

Here's an overall shot of a DRGW unit coming off the ship on Hallowe'en Day, 1961. You can see that the silver is silver, the yellow isn't tangerine orange, the gray on the nose is gray, and the roof over the power hood sections is black, along with the trucks. Gray on the roof was a mistake made by Rivarossi and it's trained our eyes ever since! Same photo credits. In the shot, second from left, is KM Technician Otto Baumgartner, who was of tremendous help to the SP 9010 restoration, and to the creation of the KM book published by SPH&TS. Very cheerful guy, and he had his original notebooks and photos dating back to the 1958 tests that inspired SP and KM to order.

~ BZ



Edited 3 time(s). Last edit at 08/23/15 21:18 by Notch16.

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Here's a shot of the roof, showing the color application lines, and that it's black. You can also see that the end of the unit is black; Rivarossi was correct in painting theirs in Aspen Gold -- but only if you count German testing; DRGW apparently specified the ends to be black, and any units built by KM with Gold ends were repainted before delivery. It's never easy! :-)

And below that is another view showing the SP patch color issue -- you can see the variation in patch paint hue and intensity. 

Photo 1 is Rittimann credit, photo 2 is from the SP 9010 collection.

~ BZ

 



Edited 3 time(s). Last edit at 08/24/15 01:30 by Notch16.

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HB90MACH Wrote:
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The one picture I have
> shows just after the rio's went to SP. The body
> is a match for the Aspen but the plows still hold
> the orange. I find it interesting that it faded
> to a close match to the ASPEN COLOR. The as
> delivered looks a lot like the orange polly scale
> calls drgw gold.

Thinking a little more about this, those plows took a beating. It's possible in the pic you have that the unit has already faded over the body, but DRGW painted just the plow. And that might look like a different color, based on how faded the KM paint became.

I've got a bottle of Tru-Color TCP-45 Aspen Gold here, and to my eyes, having looked at dozens of photos hundreds of times, it looks very dead on to my best guess for what the KM delivery color was. I never saw the units until after they were painted Scarlet and Gray, so my eyeballs aren't of any help on that score, but the TCP color looks exactly right and feels exactly right to me too, for what that's worth -- just as SD452XR and DRGWTennPass have posted above.

~ BZ

 



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 08/24/15 01:33 by Notch16.

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So what is reasonable for the faded color.
The grey roof could have come from the idea of the paint fading. Black would fade grey. What about the nose. Green or grey. I see a lot of models with it being PC green but no prototype that way. I have decided to do one unit in the as new and one faded. If I read this right. I need aluminum toned paint. Not silver.

Possible. Tru color. Reefer yellow or el. Yellow. Or some color in between

"Aluminum" and "Silver" get exchanged a lot, but "Aluminum" is what the KM specs say. It's based in aluminum powder being the metallic base of "silvery" paint. I guess when I think of "silver" I think of something more bright and chromy, with more liquid reflectivity. So yeah, "Aluminum" would set you in the right direction.

I can't speak to the color of the nose anti-glare panel used on other DRGW units. But it's "battleship gray" on the ML 4000 as delivered. UP Harbormist Gray might be a pretty good choice, and of course, because it's for anti-glare, that should be flat. And I wouldn't go too light on the roof fading: exhaust soot kept the black pretty black. A little dirty dark brown around the edges, maybe.

Fading the body color might be better done by either adding white to the Aspen Gold before shooting, or adding a light airbrush overcoat of flat white to the finished Gold. That's a touchy technique that can go overboard, and I'd experiment with adding white to the base paint first. And eventually you'd want a nearly dead-flat finish, rather than the nice gloss that the new units showed. (Not for long!)

The overall fade of the DRGW units wasn't as dramatic as it was with the Dark Gray of the roadswitcher-style Series ML 4000s, which went really chalky. In fact, a tiny bit of white in the Aspen Gold and the dead flat overcoat might do the whole job. Then use bright fresh Aspen Gold to put patch blocks over the locations of the Rio Grande road name, the little DRGW unit number at the back, and underneath the 15-inch 'SP' on the nose, and the new SP nose number.

Someone on TO may have created black decals for the 15" road name. I haven't searched that option. Good luck!

~ BZ

 

Notch16 Wrote:
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<< SNIP >>
>
> Someone on TO may have created black decals for
> the 15" road name. I haven't searched that option.
> Good luck!
>
> ~ BZ
>

The 15" black SOUTHERN PACIFIC road name lettering Clyde King used on his model came from the ~original~ release of Microscale's decal set #11, way back in the early 1970s.  The first run of that set included ONE pair of black 15" Southern Pacific lettering and one black SP nose initial, in addition to the lettering gray letters the set normally included.  The black lettering was apparently deleted in subsequent print runs of the decal set and never offered again.  Clyde carefully hung on to his sole example for decades before they were finally applied!

FWIW, photos of my friend Clyde's model, depicting the ~ s i g n i f i c a n t ~ amount of work undertaken on the old HO scale Rivarossi model, all to better represent a pair of Espee units as they would have appeared in the mid 1960s, are found in this gallery

http://www.pbase.com/espeef5/more_km_project_photos

BTW, that Rio Grande yellow used on the model came from a bottle of Accu+Paint D&RGW Yellow I'd purchased back in the 1980s.  Good thing I did, because the Tru-Color version didn't come along until a few years after Clyde painted his model.

Enjoy!

Rob
 

Aluminum is ground up aluminum in a paint medium. silver is a shiny reflective grey ore or less. so there is a noticeable difference. The D&H RF16 shark nose units have aluminum under frames and it stands out in the just painted photos, and a night saftey factor too.

As for the ML4000's they are large scale. So there is more paint to see. But the bigger size means a lot more color visibility. More impact. I have put a lot of work into them and dont feel like messing them up with a lousy pint job. I will do the adding white to the color to fade. a little more controllable.

Just as a side note, I did add the chimneys to the one unit. That short lived experiment for ducting cold air on the outside of the carbody before they made it internal ducting. Capping the top engine vents and making the lower ones along the car body sill. Sound familiar, it should. Later locomotives would have a T designation on the end for this ducting. T for tunnel motor. These were the first tunnel motors. So I had to do one with the outside plywood chimney. Found only one pic but it was enough. to work with.

Rio Grande and SP both worked with KM resident advisors on modifications to their three (each) Prototype ML 4000s. But each railroad had their own ideas about how to accomplish the same task.

Rio Grande's experimental "chimneys" had a Fireman-operated diverter that would allow combustion intake air to be directed either to the exising top intakes, or to be directed to the new, lower intakes along the sill line. SP's experiments simply divered the intake air from the bottom without provision for intake at the original height.

Rio Grande and KM apparently found that the low location was optimal for tunnels and snowsheds, but not so good out in the open, where kicked up dust would also be ingested. The ultimate solutions for both railroads -- again, with unique execution -- had the diverter option, but the flaps were operated automatically by engine temperatures through a thermocouple and air cylinder.

SP's permanent solution put louvers on the lower carbody. Rio Grande's, which preceeded SP's, used rectangular screened openings. Here's a link to some light reading (304 pages hardcover color) with many photos and modeler-friendly details and descriptions of all the mods these overworked beasts would receive in their short lifetimes:

http://sphts.org/store/books/southern-pacific-and-the-km-hydraulics-robert-zenk.html

Details of a couple photos from that book are here, both taken by Bruce Meyer circa 1962. Others can vouch for the book, but I should stay objective; the author is family. :-)

~ BZ

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Albrae Wrote:

> The 15" black SOUTHERN PACIFIC road name lettering
> Clyde King used on his model came from the
> ~original~ release of Microscale's decal set #11,
> way back in the early 1970s.  The first run of
> that set included ONE pair of black 15" Southern
> Pacific lettering and one black SP nose initial,
> in addition to the lettering gray letters the set
> normally included.  The black lettering was
> apparently deleted in subsequent print runs of the
> decal set and never offered again. 

That explains why I remembered it! I also think there was a Chartpak set from the late 1960s that included black 15" dry transfers in the SP Clarendon style, but I may be hallucinating. Chartpak was the modeler's friend, since there was no decal film. You just didn't want to handle the model repeatedly, or the heat from your fingers would soften the wax medium and distort the lettering!

~ BZ

Wish I had known about the book before I started these two. Thanks for the info. Have to add that one to the collection.