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Pragmatic Pre-Grouping - Mikkel's Workbench


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I agree the RAL009 is too blue. I have discussed colours with friends who new the GWR  (mostly post 1928) and with Alan Brackenborough who had  cellulose specially mixed for him as he painted rather a lot of GWR locos. The colours he used were generally accepted as correct.  I would say somewhere between Ian's two locos but the colour on a 7mm loco could look slightly different to the same shade on a 2mm one. My personal experience was in the 50s and 60s. Some were still in GWR livery in the early 50s but were usually due a repaint by then. So I remember the BR green used by Swindon. 

Of course anyone who had seen locos in pre 1906 livery would be rather elderly and it would be difficult to  remember the exact shade after all this time. Choose something that you feel is right and go with that. I am rather skeptical of discovered swatches that may not be as they were painted. After all locos were not kept in the dark.

 

Don

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Mikkel,

To be a pain, is this Swindon green, or Wolverhampton green?  Mike Oxen has a thread on Wolverhampton green.  (Forgive me if I have posted on this before.)

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  If it is of any help, When I spray my Green I always spray a satin black on the undercoat ,Then I spray on the green when all  is dry, It makes the green look much better, Worth a try,

Garry

Edited by mswjr
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7 hours ago, Donw said:

Choose something that you feel is right and go with that.

 

I agree Don, the more I realize how much lightingand weathering means, the more we can never know exactly what was right.

 

5 hours ago, ChrisN said:

Mikkel,

To be a pain, is this Swindon green, or Wolverhampton green?  Mike Oxen has a thread on Wolverhampton green.  (Forgive me if I have posted on this before.)

 

Hi Chris, I'm trying for Swindon green. Although I like the Wolverhampton shade too. And some day I'ld like tro on this too: https://www.rmweb.co.uk/community/index.php?/topic/67-how-realistic-are-your-models-photo-challenge/&do=findComment&comment=1048664

 

 

2 hours ago, mswjr said:

  If it is of any help, When I spray my Green I always spray a satin black on the undercoat ,Then I spray on the green when all  is dry, It makes the green look much better, Worth a try,

Garry

 

Thanks Garry, I had heard about black primer but not this trick. Sounds interesting. How many coats of green do you use over the black?

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3 hours ago, mswjr said:

  If it is of any help, When I spray my Green I always spray a satin black on the undercoat ,Then I spray on the green when all  is dry, It makes the green look much better, Worth a try,

Garry

Not a bad idea: the green weathered towards black. Varying the number of top coats might create subtle variations in this effect.

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 I only do one or two light coats , And you can tell whilst doing it, When to stop, Have a practice your see what I mean, Also you can mask off anything that is black,  To be honest That was the reason I done it black to begin with, Just noticed that the green looked better when I had finished.

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23 hours ago, Regularity said:

Not a bad idea: the green weathered towards black. Varying the number of top coats might create subtle variations in this effect.

By "weathering towards black" do you mean the build up of soot, dirt and dust on top of the paint?

 

If so, wouldn't it be better to get a good solid green colour underneath, as if the loco was just out of the shop, and then weather it down? I.e. to replicate the natural processes rather than produce something where the weathering is baked into the paint?

 

If not, then can you explain why a green coat of paint would weather towards black by some other process?

 

(Consider also that the varnish applied to locos tended to yellow and lighten the appearance of the paintwork with age.)

 

Edited by Harlequin
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This black undercoat lark sounds rather interesting. Are we heading in the direction of "invisible green"? Or is the outcome thought to be closer to the look of a well-worn paint job - say an engine that has been in service for 5-7 years since its last full repaint?

 

Co-posted with Phil there, who is asking much the same question but from the other end.

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22 hours ago, Harlequin said:

By "weathering towards black" do you mean the build up of soot, dirt and dust on top of the paint?

 

If so, wouldn't it be better to get a good solid green colour underneath, as if the loco was just out of the shop, and then weather it down? I.e. to replicate the natural processes rather than produce something where the weathering is baked into the paint?

 

If not, then can you explain why a green coat of paint would weather towards black by some other process?

 

(Consider also that the varnish applied to locos tended to yellow and lighten the appearance of the paintwork with age.)

 

All I know is, that if you can get good colour photos of the era, that GWR locos due for the paint shop look darker and darker. There was, iirc, a 1930s photo on the back of an issue of Modellers’ Backtrack many years ago which showed this, and Chris Youell used to do a talk called, “And you thought they were all clean” which also made this point.

 

But no, it wasn’t the build up of soot, etc. No idea why: would like to know, but if that’s what good colour photos show, then that’s what they show.

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There used to be a tender at Reading in the early 60s which still had GWR on it it looked very dark. I had assume it was filthy and just the GWR had been cleaned but perhaps the paint had gone dark.

 

Don

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3 hours ago, Siberian Snooper said:

Perhaps it's the build up of the oily paraffin that is used in cleaning that adds something to the paintwork.

 

 

 

I think there is something in that, but the photo and any comments about it must have been over a quarter of a century ago!

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I have collected all the GWR loco green colours I can find on the web into a single panel, with some other relevant colours for comparison.

 

As always, the reproductions of the individual colours depends on your monitor and the lighting conditions where you view this graphic.

 

The colours here may or may not translate well to real world paint. However, we should be able to assume that paint manufacturers have striven to present their products as accurately as possible on the web sites, using properly calibrated monitors, so this at least allows the colours to be compared against each other.

 

1822436335_GWRLocoGreens.png.80ba5c9e37aca0c3552f97ba69edea40.png

 

The small rectangles in the bottom right hand corner of each cell are fully saturated so you can see the "root colour" a bit better. Where those small rectangles are not obviously visible that means the paint colour is already highly saturated.

 

The bottom row are all taken from photos (including Mikkel's plastic cup) so are even less reliable than those above! From the photos I sampled the lightest colour not showing obvious light reflection and the darkest colour not in shadow and made a graduation between the two.

 

I'm not saying this is in any way definitive - just interesting and hopefully informative.

 

Edited by Harlequin
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That shade to me looks a bluer green than any of the samples in Phil's image.

Of course displaying the colours adjacent to each other changes the colours we see.

Forgive the off-topic link but this I think is relevant here.
 

 

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19 minutes ago, MikeOxon said:

has adopted the old ‘Holly Green’ colour

 

Ummm, based on the old holly green, as Pentagram's blurb says.  It has a high blue content, and is perhaps more in alignment with the colour used initially by Wolverhampton (and adopted from the OW&WR).

 

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Wolverhampton has been mentioned a couple of times. From previous discussion here and elsewhere, I understood that "Wolverhampton Green" was ancient history by the early 20th century and most certainly irrelevant to a Dean Goods, built at Swindon. (And receiving major overhauls, boiler changes, etc. there?)

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Great Western Way is silent as to when Wolverhampton's  'deep blue green' gave way to a more Swindonised tone. It is also not clear whether the 21st century GWR's use of a 'Holly Green' is intended to be a nod to the pre-1906 very dark greens of Swindon. What is clear is that the 21st century GWR's colour contains a lot of blue, and I don't believe Swindon ever used anything with that amount of blue in it.

 

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This is a picture of Lode star, Being painted at Swindon, just to show that the undercoat colour is not the colour I thought it would be, So the under coat colour will effect the top coat , As I said I have had good results using a black undercoat, This photo was taken from a facebook page, From Peter quilley

66770217_10216925247595109_7449854369593294848_o.jpg

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I agree with you, ma’am, “based on” don’t mean anything to a fancy dan consultant. A while back I tried my hand at an old b.g. loco, and I mixed some holly green, well, to me at least, by taking quite a lot of black paint and adding a small quantity of lemon yellow, and this takes the “blueness” out. Try it and see what you think.

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On 16/07/2019 at 09:19, Harlequin said:

I have collected all the GWR loco green colours I can find on the web into a single panel, with some other relevant colours for comparison.

 

That's an interesting exercise!  Confusion reigns, although I do hope the actual colours are different from the samples in some cases. 

 

13 hours ago, Northroader said:

I agree with you, ma’am, “based on” don’t mean anything to a fancy dan consultant. A while back I tried my hand at an old b.g. loco, and I mixed some holly green, well, to me at least, by taking quite a lot of black paint and adding a small quantity of lemon yellow, and this takes the “blueness” out. Try it and see what you think.

 

 Funny you should say that, am doing something similar with my acrylics right now. Will try a spot of yellow.

 

 

 

001.jpg

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What always puzzles me is:

Are we talking about the colour of the paint or the colour that a loco looked like?

Basically what it would look like would depend on lots of things especially both the "primer" layers and the varnish. Both would influence the final colour depending on the  number of coats. And varnish would NOT be translucent clear and would have a yellow tinge which would get darker with age; indeed there was an entry in this site some years ago complaining that their Humbrol varnish had darkened  even with current technology

Loco Paint samples are only of use if what they represent is clear - observed colour or paint colour, and the you have to allow for ageing.

 

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... to say nothing of lighting, atmospheric conditions, distance. Even if you were there at the time, it would be very hard to reach a conclusion about the colour of a Dean Goods coming off Stafford Road shed at 6 o'clock on a foggy February morning in 1905, from the opposite side of the running lines.

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