Doncaster loco green?

I have a livery data sheet for B1s from Phoenix, which has paint chips glued in. I had some paint matched to the Doncaster chip and painted it on a test piece. It doesn't look right, being darker than I expected (but it matched the chip). I can't buy Craftmaster or Phoenix paint, as nanny state rules prohibit shipping it overseas. Looking at Chris Vine's book, the colour of the loco looks different in different pictures, depending on light, shadow, sun, indoors etc.. Same with pictures on the internet. I think the picture on the cover looks good, and especially the picture of the washout plugs on page 15. I am thinking of mixing Humbrol colours to match the latter and have that made up in automotive enamel. Does anyone, especially LNER enthusiasts, have an opinion on this? I am by no means a fanatic about colour but I would like it to be vaguely right.

I think that you are quite right regarding the effects of light, shade, sun, indoors, outdoors etc on the perception of colour. Certainly the great impressionist Monet thought so, hence his series of paintings of haystacks and water lilies in different light situations. I am also convinced that scale alters the perception of colour. On a recent visit to B&Q (a UK DIY store) I noticed that they had a "colour reader " in the paint section which could take a scan of a specimen of the colour and then replicate it in paint. Do automotive paint suppliers have the same sort of kit ? Otherwise the Humbrol route is the one that I would take. If you can get Humbrol paints they do a range of authentic railway colours ....Appple Green is RC408...but I do not see Doncaster Green listed.

Mick

Automotive paint suppliers do have colour scanners and mix paint to suit. They can make any colour and so can match faded paintwork on other panels.

Mike

You must understand that any picture you look at on a computer, in a magazine or anywhere else will not be true colours. If you doubt this put two monitors onto a computer and straddle the screens with a picture. I can guarantee that the monitors will display colours differently. If you want authenticity then the paint chips are the only thing likely to be correct. If you want it to look how you want it to look then mix your own colours.

Martin

hi simon,

dont try and mix humbrol enamel as the colours are not deep enough for LNER apple green - you will end up with something very pastel in colour. the humbrol yellow and blue are rather insipid.

there will be a colour 'down under' that is a good match.

there are lots of LNER experts out there who i am sure will be pleased to help with car paint matches and IS standard paints etc

cheers,

julian

Simon,

Colour Matching can be a 'Minefield' ... and I confess that I know next-to-nothing about LNER paint colours; but I can offer a couple of suggestions that might help ...

1. If you have an iOS device, with camera ... Get the "Colorometer" App, by Sandeep Mistry ... Then just point the camera at the colour you prefer [presumably on p15 of your book] and the App will display the corresponding RGB and Hex values.
2. Go to EasyRGB and input those RGB values [or the Hex] & select RAL from the drop-down list of 'color collections' ... It will then display your input colour and the four nearest RAL colours. Any decent paint-shop can work from RAL, or you can choose a different 'collection' if you prefer.

I tried inputting R=40 .. G=120 .. B=40

which looks like a pretty good start

MichaelG.

.

P.S. if you don't have access to an iOS device, there are plenty of other ways to grab RGB or Hex values.

Having recently retired after more years in the technology side of the UK paiint industry than I care to count I always read the posts about paint and related subjects with interest.

We should all realise that anything that occurred in the UK industry up to about 1980 is unlikely now to be reproducible today. The majority of the industry has gone the same route as engineering, the money men took over and took command of the techmical side. Since the work at the bench had no obvious value more and more has been imported and many skils disappeared. (end of rant). Both US and Continental European practice has been at variance with that of the UK.

Unfortunately computeised colour matching is dependendant on the characteristics of the colouring pigments that it has been fed and will attempt to match any colour it is presented with with what it knows about and has available. Some mixing schemes will operate on only 7 pigment bases and nearly all on 12 0r less.

Ol' Fred who made the colour in 1924 (post grouping) that you are trying to match when presented with a colour to match from the customer may well have sent his lad to the dry colour stores for a particular shade that he knows will give that shade or its particular undertone. He might have made fifty gallons as a first batch and used just a few ounces of the special to get the effect he wants. No way could anybody then or perhaps even now discovere what particular special Joe had used. That way led to madness of course, the paint maker down the track may have old Joe with his own colour matching ideas. See Mark Ps post.

Just a final word about RAL colours and other standards. BS381C was the first standard across the Commonwealth for Industrial colours, RAL was not heard of in Britain until the late 1960s. When first used here much effort was expended trying to achieve the colour values printed on the back of the master patterns until it was realised that only certain German companies actually achieved those coordinates. France had a different scheme - AFNOR.

Jerry

Jerry,

I bow to your wisdom ... it's good to have someone with real experience paricipating.

Personally; I would be very interested to know what you think of the EasyRGB web page.

I fully accept your reservations about computerised colour matching, but we must remember that Simon's ambition is to find a reasonable approximation to a colour that pleases him on a printed page.

MichaelG.

Some great suggestions, thanks everyone. Luckily there is a paint place not far away from me who are very helpful and knowlegeable and supply the now hard-to-get automotive enamel. I do have an iphone so will try Michael's suggestion. My initial idea, which got a bit lost, was that, assuming quite a few people have Chris' book, they could have a look at the picture on page 15 and say if they thought it was about their idea of LNER green or not. If, as Martin suggested, the paint chip is as authentic as you'll get, then I don't like it, as it is darker than any photo or model loco I have seen, and is almost like BR green.

Hello Simon.

Thank you for asking the question about LNER. colour.

I am wrestling with the same colour problem. I purchased a small amount of "authentic" Doncaster green paint

and it is very similar to army Khaki green possibly slightly lighter, and similar to BR green.

I also bought a secondhand copy of Brian Haresnapes book "Railway liveries" for LNER. In the book is a quite large colour sample patch for, C10/LNE 1. standard grass green, which apparently, if I understand correctly, is Doncaster green and all green locomotives were painted in this colour. However this colour patch is a perfect match for my Warco milling machine, and is a completely different colour. Neither colour do I particularly like, or seems to be what I perceive as correct LNER colour.

It occurs to me also that different colours have quite an effect on the perception of a vehicle. eg.A bright yellow might be fine on Ferrari or a little hatchback, but would probably look quite out of place on a Bentley.

Is there a definitive answer?

Kind regards

Anna

I think the problem is more subtle, and will be familiar to anyone who makes and paints plastic models.

The actual colour chips are the correct colour - they have to be. But they don't look right as chips or on a small test piece.

That's because we don't see chips of paint, we see full size locos in full, natural daylight, but we see test pieces and models under widely differing conditions and on a totally different scale where shadows, specular effects and reflections create a very different perception.

Add to that the 'mental image' of the correct colour which is probably heavily biased by generations of cigarette cards, book illustrations and paintings, all of which will actually contain a whole range of colours to give the impression of a loco painted in a single colour with depth and further affected by the vagaries of the printing process and time. Also other models (and the real things, all of which will have been painted in colours that may or may not be a good match to the original and will change over time anyway.

Indeed the original paint chip is unlikely to be the same shade now as when it was painted, and I've read that the skill of the paint mixer was to create a shade that would be the correct colour after the loco had been steamed a few times and the heat had had its effect on the tone. Also, two paints that look identical under one light source, might look different under a different light. This is why it's usual; to compare colours against a neutral grey background under a balanced 'daylight' bulb.

For models to look realistic one of the main changes needed is normally to use a less glossy finish, in order to prevent the model looking toylike, but as models are smaller less saturated colours often look more realistic too. One reason for this is that the smaller model appears as if farther away, and things farther from us have their colours more muted.

So there are a whole host of psychological factors involved as well as the near impossibility of knowing what the actual colour was at the time.

I've fallen foul of this myself - questioning the colour of someone's 'improved green' LBSCR loco. I even found a photo of a real one to prove it. I had to eat humble pie when (a) it became clear that there are no two pictures of models or the real thing that appear the same colour and (b) the restored loco I had based my opinion on is notorious for being painted the 'wrong' colour.

My own little loco is far too deep a blue - the consequence of dulling the gloss with a satin lacquer that greatly deepened the shade. But the original is so faded, it's impossible to tell what shade of blue it was anyway

A very interesting post, Neil. I am aware of the perceptual and psychological factors involved. I even did Psych. 1 at uni many long years ago, and there was a unit on perception. And, Anna, I remembered your post and tried to find it to add to when I started this thread, but I couldn't. As for plastic models, I used to make WW2 48 scale kits, and the same colour, say RAF dark green, from different hobby paint companies, Gunze, Tamiya, Humbrol, etc were all different. As for Luftwaffe colours, "minefield" doesn't cover it! I had planned to paint a large surface for just the reasons outlined, but I am unlikely to get around to it.

Neil,

do tell us please what you think the colour should be of Stroudley's golden ochre livery! i am shortly to paint my 5"g example of an LBSCR loco in LBSCR livery and i would hate to get it wrong!

the only genuine example of LBSCR Stroudley livery is dear old COMO in Brighton museum which i have visited many times just to see Dr J Bradbury Winter's miniature masterpiece. it is genuine because painted by the foreman painter at Brighton Works when the livery was still in use in fullsize using the same paint.

cheers,

julian

This must be about the most unscientific science there is becasue LNER Apple Green (or whatever) only exists in a few people's memory (and getting fewer!). The pigments no longer exist, the colour photographs of the day are extremely rare and are now not at all representative and, as others have stated, there were many different Apple Greens. If I were painting an engine in LNER Apple Green I would paint it to look how I think it probably should have looked and if I liked it - it'll do.
Very fortunately we have to locos here (Clarkson's original V2 and B1) that were painted (and beautifully lined and lettered by hand) in LNER Apple Green by a gentleman who owned them for a while before us who was old enough to remember what the colour looked like so they are probably as near as anyone is ever going to get. But there is no RIGHT colour. It's all just round the corner of our minds ...

Don't rub it in.

Neil

Thank you everybody for your thoughts on the right colour green and to you Simon for asking the original question. It has all been very helpful. Personally I think I will go with along with Dianes suggestion.

Of course I could always paint the model in a colour I liked and which was a completely different to the original locomotive ! How big a crime would that be?

Kind regards

Anna

I can still remember LNER green, but would not like to have to ID it. It looked different depending on - Was it raining, had it just been washed, had it been standing in a steaming bay for hours, was the sun shining, etc. etc. well you get the idea.

.

So, [just out of curiosity] Simon ... Did you try it, and was it any help ?

MichaelG.

Just try painting something Black and then you will realise just how many blacks there are!!

I once had a car that was "something" gold, during its production run the same colour had 4 variants, all of which I could recognise. There was the red version and then the black one........... To the uninitiated it was the same colour but if you looked very closely you could see the pigmentation.