Model Railroading > SP gray

So I have a relatively recent SD45T-2 and recently got 2 BB SW1500s in a collection of stuff (all Athearn and HO). They each have a different gray and I was wondering which was most correct. I tried to take a photo but in the photo they mostly look the same. One SW is only slightly darker than the tunnel motor while the other is considerably lighter. The scarlet on the darker SW is also darker than the lighter one.

So the given being the SD45T-2, how does the gray Athearn used compare to the real SP? They are all pre-speed lettering with Southern Pacific spelled out all businesslike. If anyone cares or has the same model, the SWs are factory painted 2510 and 2638.

I was planning on weathering all three as they would have appeared in the early 1990s so maybe it doesn't matter. I usually model the BN about the same time and you can easily find photos with several shades of green. Still, I just want to know.

When freshly painted, they had a somewhat dark blue-gray paint. But yard units and road units that spent their time in the southwest or on the SSW tended to fade toward a white-gray color. Road units that spent time in helper service tended to turn black. Other units like the SD9's that stayed in Oregon didn't fade as badly as those in the southwest and Texas. The various shades of paint kinda reflected the realities on the SP.

Ted Curphey
Ontario, OR

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Thanks, Ted. Where Speed Lettered units a darker gray or is their paint just generally newer and not as faded? I found a photo of 2510 in AZ and it is pretty faded. I think 2638 was assigned to southern California but it wasn't too faded by 1977.

The gray of the speed lettered units was the same as the standard SP scheme, but they were newer and less faded.

Ted Curphey
Ontario, OR

You can seriously go mad in respect of this. Batches of paint mixed to the same recipe were not identical either, never mind the myriad of shades you'll see in pictures, all taken in different light, and older ones printed in different ways.

If you lined up ten SP locomotives in the same place, from "just out the paint shop" to "ten years old", all would be different. How many too, were going over Donner, getting covered in soot, or suffered from a poor undercoat, prior to the final one being applied?

Finally, if I took pictures of a unit I painted, and compared them to pictures you took of the same unit, the colours would not the same.

Brian Moore
Plymouth, UK

Brian is right, of course, about color's appearance in the real world among locomotives in service.

There are also some scientific absolutes available to model manufacturers, and one is the SP Color Drift system, which is the official paint color control the railroad employed. The system used standardized color samples on cards kept in black light-safe envelopes. And they were the goal and standard to which any manufacturer -- of paint or locomotives -- tried to hit on target.

SP Panel 10, Dark Gray for Diesel Locomotives was originally appropriated during SP's 1958 economy binge from the center window band color of their passenger two-tone gray scheme, so you'll also hear it called "Lark Dark Gray." Most model iterations over the decades have simply been lighter than true SP Dark Gray. And by 'true', I mean something that falls within maybe a 5% range of the official hue, value, and intensity found on the Color Drift cards.

The discussions about whether colors can 'scale down' will rage forever. Some say everything needs to be lighter under model viewing conditions. And dark models do not show details to the eye as well as light models for obvious reasons. But when we talk about models out of the box, presumably we expect those models to represent a freshly-painted unit. And since no manufacturer can control the artificial lighting conditions under which a single model they produce will be viewed, there's no constant for any compensation they might choose to make. The argument that a lighter compromise is 'better' can't be true for every model railroad or every display shelf of every purchaser. Or every modeler's or collector's own set of uniquely calibrated eye-to-brain conduits.

So it's pretty simple: if we have the official samples, and we paint the new models that are supposed to look like new to match those samples, we've at least got a stake in the ground. Any modeler can then vary to their heart's content to duplicate sun fading, surface degradation, black tunnel soot, or whatever age and environmental effects have served to change the color of SP locomotives over their service lives.

But having seen with my own uncalibrated but sensitive eyeballs a few hundred brand-new or newly-repainted SP diesels over the course of a few decades, I do believe that manufacturers are finally giving us SP models which are closer to the standards that manufacturers were supposed to meet when applying Panel 10, Dark Gray for Diesel Locomotives.

And in that regard, if you compare a 1960s Athearn GP35's chalky gray -- a gray that many of us got used to, and one that looks to barely be a 50% gray value compared to their newest GP38-2 -- you'll heave a sigh and say they're finally getting things right. Same goes for the GP9s, even in comparison to the Scarlet and Gray F-units of less than a decade ago. The new models give the impression that the real colors did when new, at least to my jaundiced and opinionated retinas.

And that's all I can say about it, because models are all about impressions, not exactitudes. But there are some stakes in the ground available to us. And no one will completely agree on what's 'right', in the same way that no one can absolutely say that one piece of music in the key of 'A' is better than another, or 'perfect' in any way, but everyone can agree that an A-440 is an A-440, so that's where all the instruments get tuned to start with.

And to address pmack's original post, as Athearn models get darker, they get closer to the Color Drift controls on the Dark Gray. But the Scarlet is touchier. Later Athearn models as a rule seem to be getting closer to the SP Color Drift values. But now I get to whip right back to where Brian started: the real units varied tremendously after being in service. A little sun-fading with chalks will help match a lighter-painted model to 'reality', or a little cinder-block soot can take a dark model further in the direction it's already headed.

But between the models pmack is talking about, what I've seen has me favoring the darker ones. And now I get to have another conversation about this with Elizabeth. :-)

~ BZ

Thanks Bob, that confirms what I thought about Athearn and the gray. You can sort of date them by the shade of gray.

As far as Liz's models go she makes them look good whatever shade of gray they have.

Indeed she does. There are shades of gray, and then there's Ms. Allen's mastery, which has no shades of gray because it's absolute!

I like the theory of using the lightness or darkness of SP gray to date the model -- it's sort of like carbon dating or tree rings. :-)

~ BZ

Model Master has the closest gray to Athearn's gray