My story…
In the 1990’s our group was restoring a 1882 narrow gauge combine, set aside, detrucked and converted to a house in 1913…
It was a 10 year restoration… premiering at the California State Railroad Museum 1999 railfair.

Our group is located in a regional park… one day we were holding our regular monthly restoration day during a park special event… We had 20 or so volunteers scraping paint and repairing siding and … sanding out old lettering and tracing it…

A visitor told us “it was never painted that way”

We were still in the research phase. We were open to comments… We were intrigued… He claimed to have knowledge we didn’t…

At the time, I had a volunteer carefully sanding out layers of paint over a door, under the open platform roof extension… then tracing each layer of lettering… then we photographed each layer (Kodachrome, under controlled artificial light…) then the next… we were about 5 layers in to the 7 layers we eventually found… we had a table with the tracings… a binder with photos…

He knew we were wrong, because…….wait…..this is good…. He built a model of the car and it (the model) wasn’t painted or lettered that way….

I will now retire to my corner to scream....

Randy

Nothing odd about that at all. I have volunteered with various old warplane groups and I have heard modelers tell owners of B-17 bombers plenty of times that their paint schemes are wrong because the Monogram kits' decall sets don't look like the full-sized airplanes do.

I was talking about this subject with a co-worker who also likes trains and he suggested this movie. I have it on my Netflix list and am looking forward to seeing it. I’m listing it here because it sounds well in line with this topic: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/El_%C3%BAltimo_tren

I had one old guy come up to the 1522's cab one day and inform me that the 1500s that ran out of Kansas City were painted green.
I told another old geezer that when she was built she was a coalburner. He said "Young man I hate to inform you that you are mistaken". I showed him the holes in the frame tail piece that the stoker engine was bolted to and told him of the article in the Frisco Employee Magazine from 1926 that gave the statistics on 1522's first trip from Springfield to Newburg, how much coal she burned, tonnage, etc. He still told me I didn't know what I was talking about. I got back up in the cab and ignored him after that.
The 1520-1529 were coalburners for about a year and then converted to oil.

There was a recent "Tempest in a Teapot" on the Norfolk & Western Yahoo Group about the color of the window sashes on N&W steam locomotives. A question was asked about the proper shade and I responded with Cadmium Orange, which, based on pretty much all empirical and documentary evidence (including company color charts, N&WHS research, contemporary newspaper & magazine articles, and color sanding on existing N&W locomotives) is the proper shade. A number of self appointed experts in the group insisted that the proper color was red, because that was the way their HO scale 2-8-8-2 was factory painted, they had seen 611 back in the 1960's in Wasena Park (get real, I don't remember what I had for lunch on Monday), or had an old color photo where the windows looked "red". I guess they've never seen an old Ektachrome slide from the 1970's, they'd probably then insist that 4501 was painted "Virginia Blue".