The Central Nevada Museum & Goldfield Hist. Soc. are getting ready to paint the 1905 T&G RR wooden boxcars we acquired from Fernley. I need to know what color of paint would be correct. I do have a small paint sample from the actual boxcars but I am thinking it is probably pretty faded. Any suggestions? I need to make a decision on this fairly quickly.
Thanks so much,
Eva La Rue
CNM Curator

That's really great news that these cars are going to be repainted and are being cared for. You deserve a lot of credit for this.

Having said that, I wish I had some useful advice to offer. It's possible that there are odd corners within the car that preserve some relatively unfaded paint, but not likely. I know nothing about the T&G, but I would think that box car red probably didn't vary a great deal among roads back in the early 1900's, and if nothing else, you could do worse than get some paint matched to a good brand of model paint. And come to think of it, Dennis Storzek would have some good advice, I bet.

I assume you will have done your best to trace the faded lettering, and having done that, it's probably best to paint the car sooner rather than later. It's easy enough to make small changes to the color with a second coat at a later time.

In any case, post some pictures of the progress, please!

If this is dry old weathered wood, I bet a lot of people have some good ideas about the type of prep and what kind of paint to use to penetrate and preserve the wood. That's much more important than matching a color which is actually not a very standardized form of whatever the guys mixed that looked like boxcar red that week.

dave

Try real hard to find a painted area that was tucked away and out of the sun…e.g. behind door hardware. For South Shore cars, I used the backside of the plates which hold on the storm sash. Then send it out for analysis professionally - Welsh Color comes to mind.

Have him bring it down to a standard referenceable number like Munsell or Pantone. Munsell is better because it can describe any color, since it rates hue, saturation and lightness on an analog 0-10 scale, and thus can describe any color, without being bound to secret codebooks of formulas of pigments that go out of production.

Order a sheet of that color and maybe some adjacent colors, satisfy yourself, then cut a 2x2 sample and send it to your paint supplier.

For prep of old wood, talk to the Seashore or WRM guys like Al or Dave here, they do a lot of that.