Not all olive greens on railroad cars are or were "Pullman Green."

The green used by the Huntington "Associated Lines" such as SP and UP was a different olive. Santa Fe used yet a different shade of olive green with more yellow in it.

Prior to some time in the 1890s the Pullman sleepers were apparently a much more brown color -- similar to the brown used by the United Parcel Service.

I have read before that "Pullman Green" is more commonly called "Olive Drab".
There has been issues in the past among military vehicle restorers about proper "Olive Drab" as well.
Somebody finally researched it and discovered that that Olive Drab was easily made by mixing compatible pure black and pure yellow paints at an 85:15 ratio - this is how the paint companies did it!

CD

It should be possible to achieve a perfect match to a paint sample, so in a car restoration, one can be sure that they are matching the car color if they have a sample from the car. But beyond that objective, the color will look different under different light. A blue sky will add blue to the color. Other nearby colors may reflect their color onto the color and change it. It is likely that different people will see the color differently. Aging and exposure to light will change the color.

I make watercolor paintings of railroad subjects, so I sometimes go through the paint matching agony at that level. Last year, I was doing a Great Northern locomotive. Somewhere I had heard that the GN colors were Omaha Orange and Pullman Green. The orange was quite easy to match, and other than fading, every photograph of the orange looked very similar to the others. But the Pullman Green was very problematic. I looked at every photograph I could find, and the Pullman Green varied just about the same range as the two greens shown in the first post here; basically from an olive color to brown. But you can have green in that brown even though it seems to read brown.

The basic problem is that this Pullman Green is down near the center of the color wheel with the infinite variety of grays. Some of these grays will actually look different when another closely associated gray is placed next to them. It is as if the mind does not know exactly how to interpret the color until can realize the general proximity of the color in question. So there is point where the color matching changes from objective to subjective.

Mike, I believe I probably chimed in on this in the thread Brian referenced, but the general theme seems to be one of two paths, sanding down to get a good sample or just choosing a color that is "good enough" and do the whole car. Generally speaking, no one will ever say a word.

I swore I would never divulge it but I have before and I will probably do it again, but back several years ago when I was heading restoration of the local museum's Southern baggage car and a Southern bay window caboose, after pleading for help with color from several sources/ historical societies, I finally opted to work through it myself. I looked at every color photo I could find of SR green cars and red cabooses. For the baggage car I finally decided to trust a well known model manufacturer and so we scanned a painted but unlettered baggage car model I had. We had a quart mixed, then did a test shoot on the truck leaf springs. When I laid the model on the springs and stood back about ten feet the model practically disappeared, but the color just didn't look right in sunlight. It was much too light. Shortly afterwards, a good friend provided a color drift card for "Pullman Green Enamel", a la Atlantic Coast Line c. March 1954. Lacking anything better, I had the card matched at the local PPG dealer we were then using and they came up with "Olive Green MCV47496 B" that, as far as I'm concerned, looks "just right". This is in PPG's Omni CV line of paint, which is a color coat/clear coat automotive paint. I then had to go through the same motions on the gold for the lettering. We must have mixed and done test strips for about 4 different "gold" tints, and that was after narrowing the field by looking at color sample books. I also got a sample of the "one Shot" imitation gold and it surely didn't look correct for the appearance of the car.

The PPG gold we wound up using was "Gold Poly MCB2176***A". It looks like gold leaf on the car, which we sprayed on using adhesive stencils. I'm more than pleased with the car, and I've heard no objections to using ACL Pullman Green on a Southern Railway baggage car. In fact, I've seen another baggage car in the same series that had been recently painted and I swear it looked to me like they had done the same thing I had initially done with a painted model as the basis for the color. In the end, what we decided to do was all very subjective, but it was an "educated subjectiveness", I suppose.

As for the Southern red caboose...well, I don't even want to go there...

Here's another thought...we've all been oogling the newly restored "Sunbeam". If that looks right, why not give it a shot and see what they used to paint the car? Just a thought.

Formulas are intended for ordering more paint next week. They are useless for fixing colors over long periods of time. The problem is they rely on particular pigments, and the paint companies change their pigments from time to time. When the pigment system is gone, the formula is absolutely worthless. Ask anyone trying to get a color out of an old DuPont number.

This problem is even worse in automotive paint, where changes are being driven by VOC laws.

Seriously. People like us want a system for fixing color permanently. It seems like the paint companies ought to be best at that, so we pin all our hopes on them, and they just aren't interested in that role. They will be the first to tell you - if you need that, use a system intended for that purpose.


Oh no, I'm fairly sure the painter would have to tweak his mix to match a standard. Simply relying on a formula would not get you paid.

Exactly the same today. You don't pay the hardware store for punching the correct number into the mixing computer. You pay them when the color matches the chip. And they go out of their way to show you that it does. Because they don't trust the formula either.


The traits you would ascribe to Pantone, actually fit Munsell. Munsell is designed for identifying your color.

Pantone is designed for assuring ink consistency in print production. They don't care about matching YOUR color, they care about matching different print runs to the Pantone color of your choice. We are talking custom ink, in offset printing. Matching ink is much harder than matching paint, and without standards your print man will be all over the map. Aw heck, just change your corporate or national colors to Pantone. That is the mentality of the graphic arts industry. Classic Pantone has 1100 colors defined from 15 inks (uh oh). It's an old system made clunky by lots of evolution, and it could probably use a re-org. Oh hey. Pantone has a new system called "Goe" which overlaps fully, has 2100 new colors defined from 10 inks. Pantone insists they are not phasing out Classic, but what would stop them. In any case, the inks are secret sauce; if Pantone drops support you have no recourse except compare your Pantone book to a Munsell book.

Munsell is a system of color notation, a "metric system" for color. It's based on wavelengths of light, reflectivity and other basic physics. The notation is human-readable without a secret decoder ring. Here: 2.5YR 6/14 is:

Hue (roughly): YR = Yellow+Red, or orange.

Value (lightness): 0/ is pure black, 10/ is pure white, 6/ is medium-light.

Chroma (intensity): /0 is gray, /10 is a bold color. /14 is very intense.

Yeah. Traction Orange.

To refine hue, there are 10 lettered hues, and a 0-10 range within each.
http://dba.med.sc.edu/price/irf/Adobe_t ... nsell.html

That's it. Now you can read Munsell notation.

The color-space allows any decimal number. However, the Munsell company publishes "books of color" with chips for the round numbers, and with one hue per page. Here are some.
http://thisismyheartitiseasilybroken.bl ... harts.html
http://www.wetcanvas.com/forums/showpos ... stcount=19

I really like how well the pages illustrate "gamut", or the range of possible colors. I.E. how intensity is limited for certain colors. Pastels can't be intense. Nor can blues.

Ink has a narrower gamut than paint, so the Pantone book fits inside the Munsell book. Process ink (CMYK like your inkjet) fits inside Pantone. Your RGB computer display has a completely different gamut. So do the paint scanners at the paint stores. I took a South Shore orange color sample to Sherwin Williams, it couldn't read it. Understandable; 95% of their trade is architectural.

By contrast (pun intended) look at the Awlgrip card. http://www.jmsonline.net/awlgrip-us-pai ... orcard.htm
Like I say, your monitor cannot fully capture those colors. But look how dark so many of them are. Needless to say these guys don't have any trouble with intense or dark.


Ask RailBox while you still can. With any luck they can give you a Munsell or Pantone number.

Or you may find your paint forensics lead you by the nose to a Pantone number or a Munsell "book color".

Ah! But which Railbox yellow? The current RBOX yellow is a far distant relative of the original RBOX yellow. The original was much more brilliant with an orange hue, whereas the current color is closer to what Caterpillar paints their equipment now. Actually, to think of it, the colors between Caterpillar and Railbox seem to have evolved together. Funny that.

Michael Seitz
Missoula MT

There is a reason for this... it's called government meddling in the paint industry. Long before VOC levels were regulated, there were repeated efforts to ban various inorganic pigments. Yellows and greens were particularly affected, as most of the brilliant yellow pigments are heavy metal salts. It was not enough to simply regulate which paint compounds could not be used for residential work; the environmentalists decided that the way to limit the future number of Superfund sites was to outlaw the use of certain compounds entirely, thereby destroying the market and ending production. You need look no further than how the Union Pacific's trademark color has wandered around over the last thirty years to see the results of this policy. It may have made sense from an environmental standpoint, but it's been hell on us preservationists.

I was quite active in preservation when the first wave of this took effect in the early seventies; at that time I used to use white lead based Scotch Laddie primer on my breakfast cereal instead of cream. At the time the paint companies were more than willing to send a color through the lab for re-formulation. To do this they'd pull their drift control card for the old color and match it as best they could in the pigments they still had available. Now, forty years hence, the paint companies feel that if a color hasn't been ordered for four decades, there is no market for it, and rightfully so.

Back in those days, the major paint companies were so forthcoming with samples and information that we became spoiled... we expected the manufacturers to maintain these color libraries forever. In the late seventies - early eighties, I set out to find the correct paint for a proposed restoration of a Soo Line diesel locomotive that unfortunately never happened. I wrote DuPont about the availability of the maroon specified on an EMD styling diagram. At the time, this information was about twenty five years out of date. DuPont responded by sending a portion of a drift card with the original color, apologizing that the card had been cut, explaining they were in short supply. They also sent their current Imron color book asking if any of the stock colors would be suitable, or would it need to be a custom match.

Fast forward twenty years, and I was in contact with DuPont Performance Coatings trying to obtain drift cards for two other obsolete color codes the Soo Line had specified for maroon; the object being to substantiate that the colors did not match, and the direction of the color shift. DuPont's reply was prompt, pleasant, and completely not helpful. Yes, the codes were obsolete. No, they had no record of them, nor any access to drift cards, but if I could supply a sample they would be happy to match it. They also included a list of all the codes that a search on "Soo Line" had turned up, in case any of those colors were what I was looking for.

Reading through that list was quite troubling, as there was a "Soo Line Maroon" listed with a formulation date sometime in the 1990's, a good thirty years after this color had become obsolete on the railroad. It was obvious that someone in the preservation community had a color matched, and DuPont had applied that name. The problem is, they could not tell me what they had matched the color TO, so I have no idea which of the predecessor colors it might have been, and no way of judging how closely it was matched. The chain of provenance has been broken.

And that is the point of this long winded tale. We can no longer rely on the paint manufacturers to archive antique color information; historic paint codes are only useful to substantiate that different equipment is supposed to look the same, or different. You can no longer expect to get back to the original color through the historic documentation, so you had better procure a good sample from the artifact before your work obliterates any chance to do so. Once you have your sample, you further need to make and maintain your own drift control card so you can obtain the same color the next time you need it, as the available commercial paints may have changed yet again.

Having the original sample analyzed and assigned a Munsell number wouldn't hurt, either.

Photographers deal with this stuff a lot, "white balance" makes a huge difference in your image.

These pages will really bring the point of how adjacent colors effect things home.

http://www.echalk.co.uk/amusements/Opti ... ption.html

Color matching devices such as Munsell are worthless for your problem.

The big problem is that pigments today are very different from pigments in the past. Greens and yellows almost always contained lead chromate that now is prohibited. That's why old formulas such as Dulux are no value. Only recently have good organic yellow pigments become available. For many years yellow cabs probably have been called cream cabs after the paint faded.

Another problem is that your old paint will have faded. Even if you had a perfectly preserved can of your old paint it would not match today. The best you can do is put a sample of your faded paint such as a window sash or a large hinge in the computer. Your new paint may be a perfect match today, but the pigments may fade differently than the old paint. In a few years your patch may become obvious.

I know of one car project that maintained custom pressure cans of the faded paint color for touching up paint where needed. It could be feathered onto the car so future color differences were not obvious.

As someone with professional training in soil science, where the Munsell system has been the USDA standard method of describing soil colors since about 1930, I disagree.

The Munsell system is not a color-matching device, it is a device-independent system to consistently describe any possible color. For example, if I were reading an article published in 1935 I could tell exactly what color the author was describing (e.g. 2.5YR 5/4) without worrying about how a colored ink would have faded over the years; my Munsell soil color book has a sample of that color.

How the color is produced in a paint or ink is of no concern to Munsell notation, the only thing that matters is whether the resultant color matches the standard.

Admittedly, colors in books like the Munsell Book of Color can drift over time, so for critical matching it is necessary to use fresh color standards. However, as long as Munsell color standards are available, a standard of the same Munsell number will always provide a consistent color to which batches of paint can be matched

Precisely why they had to ban lead. If they allowed it in industrial paints, there were legions of purists like you who would have gone out of your way to get "the good stuff" for your house. Hey, I'm not 100% against you - I own the very last can of leaded anything ever sold by a famous regional paint company Who Shall Not Be Named. I know because I dealt directly with the factory. I was saving it for when you really really need it. But then I discovered epoxies and polys, so it's going to a museum.

I agree about the pigments though. In fact I agree quite fully with the rest of what you said.



The world has changed, and they don't want to be the custodians of color anymore. They were coasting on a prewar model where Pantone didn't exist and Munsell wasn't really developed yet. There wasn't anyone else to be a custodian of color, so it fell on them, and besides, it was a great opportunity to lock their customers into their paint, so they seized it.

What happened is the Macintosh and desktop publishing, which took a specialty - graphic arts - and thrust it into the hands of consumers. Pantone marketed themselves well in that time, and achieved household-name status. Everybody thinks Pantone when they think color standards. There's a container behind Yahoo HQ that is painted in Yahoo purple, and I GUARANTEE you that when they ordered their paint, they called out a Pantone color. Where did that Pantone color come from? Was it the best match for Yahoo Purple? Heck no - they picked Yahoo Purple from the Pantone book from day one. We thought computer graphics sucked when there were only 4096 colors, but thanks to Pantone, there are less than that today in the print world. Nobody is going to spec a non-Pantone color, how do you even communicate it?

So now, the paint companies all have customers (who care about color) calling out Pantone or Munsell or RAL, and there's no reason or need for paint companies to be custodians of color anymore.


It was broken a long time ago. In the can, on the car, under layers, you have the same problem. Paint fades and drifts. (they don't call them "drift cards" for nothin' :) You can't play the game of telephone with color standard, hopping from original to scraping the car to museum paint to new museum paint. Unless you have a fairly canonical source, or a fixed system to "snap back" to, you have nothing. If your railroad used Munsell numbers and you can know that, then the hard part is done.

And by the way, that's why it's not useful to blast all the old paint off a car. It makes for a better finish job, but it trashes historic fabric that you can use for color analysis.


I think one prominent railway museum in each region should coff up the $900 and buy a Munsell Book of Color, and tour the collection and then the region fixing some colors. Or, XRite makes a gadget called ColorMunki which seems to be scan a surface and give you the Munsell or Pantone number. I have no idea if it'll give an accurate, non-integer Munsell number, or merely the closest chip.

Precisely why they had to ban lead. If they allowed it in industrial paints, there were legions of purists who would have gone out of your way to get "the good stuff" for your house.

And boy, environmentalists just get all the blame. Some folks don't want the railroad next door, and you call them "environmentalists" when they're really NIMBYs. A professional oilfield scientist predicts peak oil, and suddenly that's the environmentalist's fault. People stop a vicious corporate raider from looting and destroying a private timber company, putting thousands out of work and destroying a regional economy -- and oh, it's the damn environmentalists interfering with Good Solid American Business. America wants energy security so we don't have gas lines again, jacks up automotive MPG standards, and who gets blamed for shrinking cars? One guess! Don't even start me on all the "Green Marketing" and corporate scams foisted on us in the name of the environment while the real environmentalists scream "that's the wrong way to do that".

So I'm pretty sure environmentalists had nothing to do with it. I think once the truth came out about lead, no paint company wanted the unlimited product-liability exposure that would come from continuing to market the stuff.

Hey, I'm not 100% against you - I own the very last can of lead paint ever sold by a famous regional paint company. I know because I dealt directly with the factory. I was saving it for a case when I really really needed it. But then I discovered epoxies and polys, so it's going to a museum.

I agree about the pigments though. In fact I agree quite fully with the rest of what you said.



The world has changed, and they don't want to be the custodians of color anymore. They were coasting on a prewar model where Pantone didn't exist and Munsell wasn't really developed yet. There wasn't anyone else to be a custodian of color, so it fell on them, and besides, it was a great opportunity to lock their customers into their paint, so they seized it.

What happened is the Macintosh and desktop publishing, which took a specialty - graphic arts - and thrust it into the hands of consumers. Pantone marketed themselves well in that time, and achieved household-name status. Everybody thinks Pantone when they think color standards. There's a container behind Yahoo HQ that is painted in Yahoo purple, and I GUARANTEE you that when they ordered their paint, they called out a Pantone color. Where did that Pantone color come from? Was it the best match for Yahoo Purple? Heck no - they picked Yahoo Purple from the Pantone book from day one. We thought computer graphics sucked when there were only 4096 colors, but thanks to Pantone, there are less than that today in the print world. Nobody is going to spec a non-Pantone color, how do you even communicate it?

So now, the paint companies all have customers (who care about color) calling out Pantone or Munsell or RAL, and there's no reason or need for paint companies to be custodians of color anymore.


It was broken a long time ago. In the can, on the car, under layers, you have the same problem. Paint fades and drifts. (they don't call them "drift cards" for nothin' :) You can't play the game of telephone with color standard, hopping from original to scraping the car to museum paint to new museum paint. Unless you have a fairly canonical source, or a fixed system to "snap back" to, you have nothing. If your railroad used Munsell numbers and you can know that, then the hard part is done.

And by the way, that's why it's not useful to blast all the old paint off a car. It makes for a better finish job, but it trashes historic fabric that you can use for color analysis.


I think one prominent railway museum in each region should coff up the $900 and buy a Munsell Book of Color, and tour the collection and then the region fixing some colors. Or, XRite makes a gadget called ColorMunki which seems to be scan a surface and give you the Munsell or Pantone number. I have no idea if it'll give an accurate, non-integer Munsell number, or merely the closest chip.

After a couple of attempts Sherwin Williams have come up with a great match to our original colour sample, the picture shows 4 colours one of which is latex, then a lighter awful attempt, then Sherwin Williams first match attempt which was a very dark olive/brown probably good for sleeper cars, then finally tinted slightly more green we come up with a superb dark Olive.
Thats it....no more mixing !!

Mike Pannell
car 57
Cheyenne

Did I hear latex? Why would anyone even consider latex?

Just as an aside, the paint adhesion on your end siding seems to be failing already. If the surface prep was the same on the whole car, it's not really worth investing the time to do the striping, because it will only last a couple years before the surface needs to be stripped again.

I don't really have a suggestion... Uncle Sam took away all the products I used to use, but a lot of folks on this list seem to have good luck with epoxy formulated for marine use... Awl Grip comes to mind.