I looked up the color panel for “Scarlet Red” in “A Dictionary of Color” by Maerz and Paul, 1930, and the color they illustrate is an orange red.

This is all excellent info. I guess we can surmise that depending on the build or shop date, prior to 1920, the cabin cars could either be Scarlet Lead Chromate or Toluidine Red which has no slight Orange-leaning tint. Toluidine is equivalent to Pigment Red #3. It was also used as the background color for the keystone, window sashes and most anything else PRR bright red.

Of interest in the Keystone article is the mention of “metallic brown” roofs and other bits. I have to wonder if metallic meant the same thing back then as it does now. I wouldn’t think so. Metallic paint as we know it nowadays wasn’t produced until 1928 by DuPont and it was expensive. I can’t think of any reason why you would use metallic. That’s another mystery.

To my way of thinking, in the nineteenth and early years of the twentieth century "metallic" in a color name meant the color was based on a metal oxide.

Much appreciated!!!

Makes me wonder if this brown might've been the forerunner of "Freight Car Color".

The early “Freight Car Color” was closer to brownish/orangish/red and progressively got closer to brown over the decades. I’m not saying “metallic brown” wasn’t “freight car color” but PRR pretty much stuck to the names of their colors even if the formulas changed so I’d be inclined to think that if metallic brown was freight car color, they would have called it freight car color. My opinion, not fact.

If the formula for metallic brown pops up somewhere like the Scarlet Lead Chromate, we might be able to figure the color out.