Does anyone have a good rendition of Pullman-Standard run of the mill box car brown? Late ‘40s to early ‘50s. It’s likely they had a stock color for that. I’m looking for a paint manufacturer and color code or at least something to match it to (not a photo). I don’t have a sample to work with.

[edit] aka box car red. I’m looking for the “browner” shade similar to what was used on the B&O in the sixties.

Do you mean the cars that P-S built for the freight roads, or something Pullman used in passenger service (i.e.. the euphemism "economy baggage")? If the former, here is a list of freight car customers for P-S during the steam era and just after:, most of the early cars would be box car red I would guess http://www.steamerafreightcars.com/prot ... oxcars.xls
http://www.steamerafreightcars.com/prot ... oxCars.pdf

Edit: unfortunately most photographers didn't take photos of freight cars (because of the cost of film and developing) but here are some CGW P-S freight cars from 1951, photographed in 1982, that I know were box car red, I have one of these for my HO set. I also have a request on the CGW closed group for newer photos:

This is for a PS-1 project. The paint scheme will honor a road that had them but did not have it’s own specific color like some others. The car came from the Michigan City plant. It would have had an “off the shelf” color. P-S had their standard colors, specified by their own numbering system, a fair portion of which I haven’t been able to crack. In this case, I don’t even have a P-S number not that it would do much good.

My hope is that someone has matched the generic P-S red/brown on a freight car repaint as trying to go by photos is absolutely the last thing I want to try to do.

PMC, hoowee, those are some filthy cars. You can’t really tell what color they’re supposed to be.

Here is one when new, thanks to the CGW closed facebook group:

That’s very red. What I need is the more generic brown. This is what I’m looking for: http://thepwvhiline.com/HistoricEraImagesJan2006Pa/PWVonNW008Web.html

What makes you think P-S had a stock color? Every indication I've seen leads me to believe the paint type and color were specified by the customer, even if they were only following Pullman's suggestion. If you have a specific lot of cars in mind, you should contact Bob Webber of the Pullman Library at IRM. https://www.irm.org/pullmanlibrary/ I believe the PS-1 boxcars were built late enough that the library has the correspondence files concerning each lot. Sometimes there are even drift cards in the files.

It kinda stands to reason that there were some standard colors as so many railroads had the same color cars. Sort of like EMD’s color book. Sure, you could specify any color and likely paid a little bit extra if Pullman had to buy it unless they stocked it for future orders. I’m not sure about Pullman or about the ‘40s and ‘50s in general , but a lot of paint was purchased as bulk pigment and mixed as needed.

I’ve worked with Bob on interior and exterior passenger car colors. All of Pullman’s colors have their own internal color code. Without finding any documentation that specifies what paint data those codes refer to, I’ve only cracked maybe 1/3 of them. That said, I’ll see what they have on freight cars.

Good suggestion, though.