Hopefully, RITH, by the time I'm done with this thread, if ever, everyone will know exactly which colors to paint their particular Reading locomotives, big or little, including the model manufacturers.

One of the worst Reading model paint jobs I can recall was on the original Atlas C424. LOL

I have touched on the blues here and there suggesting possibilities but have never looked at them as seriously as the greens and yellows which were and are my main objective. If we keep going until we get most of the main fleet colors the Reading used, that's okay with me.

Not only that, there's quite a few other railroads with unknown paint codes we could examine also.

Actually, I believe I'm in pretty good shape now with the Grande Gold and should be able to draw my conclusions soon. The final tally should be four yellows, five greens, and one black but hey, you never know. I've got more chips coming in the mail as well.

If you resize your pics to 675 pixels wide, they'll fit neatly into the page without blowing it out. Here's another shot that pretty much proves the Safety Always Yellow, 5248, was the same color across the board. That orangish-appearing yellow on the RDC's scare stripes, at first glance, looks an awful lot like Maine Central's yellow...

EDIT: I don't know what happened with RITH's postings there but I'll leave mine as is.

Yeah, the MEC's somewhere on the second page of yellows. #254 is the same locomotive that went off the rails out there in Long Beach, CA not too long ago... LOL

Ah, the good news is it's not another yellow. LOL I have no idea what this color looked like in person because I never saw it not living in the Reading's RDC territory and such. It could be 082 Omaha Orange or even a fluorescent orange which does tend to fade more yellow as it ages. I do like the color of the Turnpike logo, though...

Now, if I just happened to pull this one out of my butt already, please don't send me flowers to cover up the aroma as I like to start my own from seed. LOL There's a very, very good chance Maine Central used old Reo truck colors. I'm leaning toward the Gold Comet Green in the upper right but who knows if they didn't use both. 93-72060 does look more like the natural color of an Eastern White Pine, however, while 93-55323 appears a bit more sprucey...

Nothing too awful exciting this morning except perhaps a little MEC versus fading Reading...

That's not to say things aren't going to get much more exciting later on tonight. Eric, you're going to absolutely love this since it could be a far more spectacular crash and burn than even the UPS truck. LOLOLOL Here's a sneak preview so set up the lawn chairs, gather together all your buddies, and keep the popcorn at the ready!!!...

Okay then, this is actually pretty cool because it's a good lesson for anyone else who wants to pull a stunt like this paint color figuring and then post it on the internet. LOL

Early on, way back when I started this process and before I joined RYPN, I did look at a color called Chevrolet Seacrest Green as a possible equivalent of Woodfield. The pictures looked good and it was placed on the original short list of chips I wanted to check out later. When my 1954 DuPont chip book arrived, I ended up dismissing the color basically for not being saturated enough and never investigated it further.

This morning, after posting the MEC vs. Reading photos, I was goofing around on eBay looking for potential Christmas presents when, of course, I just had to search for fleet paint chips again and then I ran across this...

So then I thought, oh crap, I really should probably run the Seacrest through the mill here and sure enough, watch what happens when I gradually increase the saturation level on the chip scan...

The outdoors chip photo is even better. LOL Here it is oversaturated to about the same point I did #251's pic on Page 18...

Calling Seacrest Green "Woodfield" would be a great Orwellian-like method to disguise the color in plain view like they do with the numbers sometimes. LOL

Since I couldn't resist the urge to buy it now, I do have one of those old Kem Transport fleet color wall charts coming in the mail soon along with a more modern NAPA Martin Senour catalog I bought earlier that seems to have gotten hung up somewhere in the postal system. I still need to see all the chips in question to make a final determination on the Woodfield.

Seacrest Green is yet another old General Motors color so it does fit in with that particular theme of the earlier Reading diesel colors. The hue angle, at around 156 degrees, along with its lighter and darker counterparts on the '54 chart, is pretty much the same as the Singer/Seven Up greens except less saturated.

Come to think of it, this may help explain why there's such a difference in the old and new green paint on the White Pass and Yukon's engines. 79039 is one of the more saturated colors...

http://www.rrpicturearchives.net/showPi ... id=3422792

Could be normal fading and weathering, though. Sort of an anti-climatic ending to this bit, a warning for WP folks as this photo may have been originally a black and white which was later colorized. Just seems like a lot of monochrome in it...

Good morning!!! I'm still trying to figure out what to blame for that one, the pictures or the chips. LOL Like I said, the pictures looked good.

Here are Plate #99, Plate #100, and Plate #101 alternative examples all in sequence. It's not very hard to see which one of those three would be the Woodfield...

Here's another shot of Narva Green on a 1951 GMC now paired with Sahara Tan, 93-530, Plate #12. This color is very similar, if not identical, to Chevrolet Cream, 93-24594, Plate #10.

The description that accompanied the picture set called this color "Mobat Green" but I don't believe that for one second... LOL

Researching how a particular color behaves over a wide range of examples is essential when undertaking a project of this magnitude. LOL Yeah, you really need to look at pretty much everything you can find if you want to find the right color. Alternative examples play a key role in helping to determine whether the color mimics the same characteristics of that on the railroad-oriented subject-at-hand.

Here are three pics of Chevy Ocean Green, 93-72002, Plate #98 which in later incarnations was also known as Meadow Green and Medium Green. The color is a couple shades lighter than Narva Green but even when the Narva fades like on that pic of #905, as a rule, it's still darker than the Ocean...

I'm glad I've already looked over Seacrest Green beforehand because that will save some serious time now that it's dead-center in my scope right at the moment.

Pre-WWII chip sheets are fairly rare but they're out there. It's not listed anywhere prior to 1947 but finding Seacrest in a thirties fleet version would pretty much seal the deal as the Western Pacific received their FT's during the war, not afterwards like the Reading did.

Well, guess what? I've got even another set of chips coming in the mail...

Reading's FT's were delivered in February, 1945.

In Europe, the US Army did not cross the Rhein until March 7, 1945. In the Pacific, the campaign for Okinawa began March 26, 1945.

I had commented earlier that, since the war was still being hard fought, the green on the FT's would not have typical green pigment as the copper was needed for the war effort. Remember, they were planning to invade the Japanese Home Island of Kyushu in 1946.

The RDG FT paint scheme was based on the B&O E and F unit paint scheme with the colors rearranged. This was in turn based on Otto Kuhler's design for B&O P-7 Pacific 5304 as streamlined for the Royal Blue train from Jersey City to Washington and return.

[5304's tenure on the Royal Blue was short as EMC's first E-units soon replaced steam on the train, also with Kuhler's design. 5304 was streamlined a second time in 1947 for the Cincinnatian with a design by Olive Dennis, a B&O civil engineer]

Phil Mulligan