Now this might explain a lot... LOL

According to Encycolorpedia, 6202 and 1317 share the same hue angle...

93-6202...

https://encycolorpedia.com/3e6743

93-1317...

https://encycolorpedia.com/39643e

The Reading's 046 and the Southern's 5800 are only one degree apart...

93-046...

https://encycolorpedia.com/29432f

93-5800...

https://encycolorpedia.com/36563e

That little insert, being somewhat translucent, color-shifted quite a bit after removed from the rest of the lemon juice lid so that's probably not a good example. Like the shell of the GP-20, looking at a flat angle across it gives the best representation of the color. Appears a little bluer that way.

It is becoming clearer, however, as to why 1317 could be used as a catch-all for both a Reading and a Southern green. This pic of both Southern greens coupled back-to-back was messed with before it was posted on the internet so I messed with it again... LOL

All the Woodfield codes I posted earlier from Encycolorpedia...

PPG 40454, listed as a 7 Up color...

https://encycolorpedia.com/0aa067

DuPont 93-57625, listed as both a Singer and a 7 Up color...

https://encycolorpedia.com/0d7e50

93-98021, listed as a Singer color...

https://encycolorpedia.com/1e7c58

As an extra added bonus, this is the modern RAL 6024 "Traffic Green"...

https://encycolorpedia.com/008351

All have a hue angle of 156 or 157 degrees. Which one of those was the real deal? Who knows but any of them could be used as such.

Here's a couple of old Singer service vehicles. The roof and hood should be green, the wheels and bumpers white. Don't remember the lettering above the windshield, though. My dad had one of those 1965 Econolines which was then replaced by an identically-painted but then newly-restyled '69 model. The Singer DuPont codes from the S-W website are at the bottom...

And Encycolorpedia's perception of the two yellows, 93-1290 and safety always 93-5248...

93-1290...

https://encycolorpedia.com/f8c532

93-5248...

https://encycolorpedia.com/ffc300

I could add some blue or take some green out of this one but this is Reading FP-7 #900 shortly following its final '70's repaint...

Spent a small portion of the weekend thinking about those Encycolorpedia greens I posted at the top of the page. They are based upon the chip scans on PaintRef. Either something ain't right there or I'm going blind, one of the two. I checked the HSL values from the PaintRef chip page and my own samples. I get around 122/123 degrees for 6202, 127-129 for 1317, about 133 for 046, and a fairly large range of 132-137 for 5800. 120 degrees is straight green, BTW.

Now since I don't need to go get my eyes checked, here's some green which appears very similar to NS #4610's green as well as that on NS #8099 I posted earlier. If you guys were wondering how long it would take me to bring MKT's 1971 paint job into this... LOL

The Katy's yellow was slightly darker than the Reading's but that yellow on the RBMN's 30-39's looks pretty close...

And now for what could be the ultimate picture, especially if I knew more of the whats and wheres about it. Appears to be a non-railroad specific REA-painted car but no real information comes with the image.

As it is, however, any of you guys should have a strong sense of what's happening here but it looks to me the rather well-faded 1317's been stripped off the upper portion exposing the underlying and better-preserved 6202. Attempts have been made to match the 6202 with various levels of success. An "Entrance" patch-over was painted on at the end of the car...

So yeah, anyone who was around back in the seventies and into trains knew that the Reading's and Katy's greens were two different greens. The Reading seemed to like green colors that no other railroad was using at the time and placing 6202 with the Reading and 1317 for the Katy fits the pattern. 5800 was the Southern's Crescent green during the same era, no disputing that.

What's ironic about the 1969 DuPont fleet paint chip page featured on PaintRef, dulled-out as it appears, is that all three colors are represented there. I tried to enhance the page as best I could and I'll post the original downloaded image as well...

93-6202 was not a widely-used color so I am limited to the REA and later Fairbanks-Morse "Z" hit/miss farm engines as alternative examples. Curiously, there is a time line. Railway Express picked up the color in 1954 after F-M was finished with it, then the Reading in 1973 a few years after REA Express ended railroad operations. Afterwards, I guess it became one of many of those "environmental" garbage truck colors so I'm not even going to try that. LOL

Here are a couple of web pages with the antique engine codes. These go way back to the early part of the twentieth century and may serve as alternative examples of colors which predate the diesel era...

http://oldengine.org/members/shpclub/tid002.htm

http://www.oldengine.org/members/murphy ... _codes.htm

6202 is mentioned as the F-M lighter green code here...

https://www.smokstak.com/forum/threads/ ... ine.53716/

Many old engine enthusiasts just paint their lighter green F-M restorations with Rustoleum Hunter Green which is apparently a close-enough approximation. In order to get around this, I thought I'd look at eBag for unmolested original parts and found a pair of rocker arms.

At the top is a rocker in 6202 and the one on the bottom is 93-72001 Green, Plate #115, that Chevy Juniper Green I mentioned at the beginning of the thread which was used by Allegheny Air. Its older Duco and later Lucite number is 1618. I'm beginning to wonder now if that wasn't the first REA darker green color but further research would definitely be required there...

If I tried this with the Pennsy, that thread would probably be about thirty pages long by now so you guys could just go ahead and make your own. LOL The problem with their drift control cards is that they only provide a proprietary reference number. A master is required to decipher those into the actual paint vendor color codes.

Eric has a few PRR codes listed, one being 6282, "Toluidine Red", and another, 44158, "Buff", which was a costlier polychrome metallic and not an imitation gold. Although not included in my paint catalog, these two can be found on PaintRef...

93-6282 Orange...

https://paintref.com/cgi-bin/paintdetai ... t=93-6282H

93-44158 Gold...

https://paintref.com/cgi-bin/paintdetai ... nt=44158LT

6282 is also the old Continental Airlines orange and the Ford Motor Company used 44158 as a special package color on 1976-77 Thunderbirds and Lincoln Mark V's...

PRR Buff for striping and lettering is #44157, not 44158, no suffix unless in later years it could have been “D” for Dulux, type would have been either Duco or Dulux though I think most likely Dulux, definitely not poly, definitely not metallic. It’s kind of a tan/sand color.

PRR’s Toluidine is a very bright, intense red, #6282, Duco or Dulux, no suffix. I don’t know why they would call that orange. It was used on the background of the keystone herald and on depot windows.

Just so you know, the color samples on paintref.com aren’t reliable.

Oh, there's a lot of stuff on the internet that isn't reliable, Eric. PaintRef has their share of errors also. For instance, they actually have two separate GMC Narva Greens listed although they're the exact same paint code...

http://paintref.com/cgi-bin/paintdetail ... va%20Green

https://paintref.com/cgi-bin/paintdetai ... va%20Green

Then, Encycolorpedia repeats the mistake...

https://encycolorpedia.com/355b58

https://encycolorpedia.com/42766e

As always, it's a matter of verifying what you see and trusting your judgement. In this case, I have an actual chip, Plate #112, so I don't have to worry too much about this one. Been fooled more than once already and I'm sure it'll happen again.

This guy has the same four PRR DuPont code numbers I thought you did. PaintRef has nothing on the other two at the moment...

http://sbiii.com/prr2.html#colors

There should be a master reference list for all the Pennsy in-house numbers somewhere so someone just needs to find it. LOL They used way more paint colors and variations thereof than the Reading did. Apparently, there were at least three different versions of Tuscan Red which is why I pointed out those two reddish-brown colors earlier on.

The "H" suffix supposedly indicates a high-performance or high-cost version of the paint color. "L", I believe, is for Lucite. Not sure about the "T".

And it was tough finding a pic of a Contintental jet where you could tell the difference between the red (066) and orange stripes. They tend to blend right into each other in most images...

I have a lot of PRR materials listing most every finish applied but... most of it is tied to PRR’s account codes. Somewhere is something that defines what those codes refer to. I haven’t been able to locate that particular something.

Agreed, “L” is Lucite. So far, I have no clue what “H” denotes. That predates the last versions of DuPont codes so it does not refer to the type of paint. “H” does show up in a lot of metallic automotive colors but I don’t think it means metallic as it isn’t consistent and there are non-metallic colors that also have that suffix. As for “T”, I haven’t run into that in railroad color codes - no clue on that one, either.

Yeah Eric, I'll have to take a look at those little letter codes at some point. Most of them, especially later on, seem to relate to the paint line like Lucite, Centari, or Imron. It's the number itself which denotes the paint color and that can apparently change depending on reformulations, who's using it at a particular time, etc. In a different paint line, PPG appears to give the same color a new number and Sherwin-Williams is just totally out-of-control with their system. LOL

Regarding the Pennsy drift cards, I noticed they were produced by the Bowles Printing Company of San Francisco, CA. Did a search for that operation but I guess they're long gone also. No help there.

The "47" in the PRR reference numbers may indicate the year that series of color standards were established, though.

I did find something tonight that about blew me away. Bob Gottschall has a new book out on the Reading Train Masters. Since I've been using some of his pics in this thread, here's a shameless plug with a listing on eBag...

https://www.ebay.com/itm/READING-RAILRO ... 4578602749

On the back cover is a picture of H-24-66 #801 in the 1962 livery but with Woodfield Green following the proposal by Harry Hammer. Never saw or heard about it before so I'm like, wow. Apparently, there was a real prototype for those funky-colored AHM models after all unless there's some major camera trickery going on here. #801 was then repainted again a few years later in the as-adopted scheme...

Off the top of my head, I think DuPont changed to using suffixes in the eighties. The ones I'm aware of are: A=Centari, D=Dulux, J=Cronar, K=Chromabase, L=Lucite and U=Imron. The previous prefixes denoted the type of paint as well as its use.


The Bowles color drift control cards are the only ones I've seen for PRR though I'd bet there were other producers.


I'm not a Pennsy expert, but my assumptions on PRR reference numbers in the XX-YYYY format were for the bean counters, that the first number is the department and the second number is the account to charge to for that particular item. Somewhere there has to be specifications of sorts for those account numbers. That's the missing piece in the PRR puzzle.


Both photos are likely the same paint job but under vastly different lighting conditions and camera settings. Dates of the photos may help there. As far as I know, the Reading being as frugal as it was, didn't paint something unless it was absolutely necessary.

I'll definitely be keeping an open mind on that one, Eric, until more facts roll in. There might be some in that book of Bob's but then I'd have to plunk down 60 more bucks to take a chance on that. LOL Perhaps Phil could chime in with some info.

The first pic of #801, taken by the shops there in Reading, is obviously overexposed somewhat but is it enough to grossly lighten the green color as such? Back while I was looking for Krazy Katy stuff, I found a few over there with a similar effect but you can still tell the green paint is 1317...

Well, take this as you will, I will debate neither color correctness nor comparisons based on photos and scans any further. As a graphic artist as well as a photographer, I do have a keen eye for all aspects of color presentation. I've determined the proper Reading Bee Line historic DuPont codes as well as the codes matched by PPG in 2012 backed with documentation. For now, I'll consider this case closed.