The LNER Encyclopedia

Hi Chaps,

Trying my hand at mixing my own paint, wasn't happy with the shade of a few off-the-shelf shades of "LNER apple green" (Doncaster), so have tried my own, shown here on a spare (redundant) bodyshell:



I think it needs more yellow, and needs to be lighter than this currently - what do you think?

I agree, and looking at this photo (admittedly taken indoors) the colour is not right at all.

http://www.train-photos.com/picture/number8565.asp

strang steel wrote:I agree, and looking at this photo (admittedly taken indoors) the colour is not right at all.

http://www.train-photos.com/picture/number8565.asp

Funny that - I was using (admittedly much older) pics of Green Arrow to try and reference the colour.

It's much more difficult to get the shade of green than getting a shade of blue, I'm finding. If I add too much white, it becomes to mossy, not enough yellow and it gets a bit lurid (as in my shot above).

For a first attempt, well, at least it's still green!

Don't wish to sound unhelpfull, but life is difficult enough already - why do you have to mix your own paint when perfectly good paints are available, and someone went to a lot of trouble to ensure their authenticity?

2512silverfox wrote:Don't wish to sound unhelpfull, but life is difficult enough already - why do you have to mix your own paint when perfectly good paints are available, and someone went to a lot of trouble to ensure their authenticity?

I just don't think, based on what I know, and what I've seen, that any of the Doncastor greens look right to me. I can fully accept that everyone else may think me mad for trying this, but I like mixing paints ( ), and having a go. I wouldn't try if I didn't think it would look good enough with an off-the-shelf colour, but I simply don't think any of them have captured the colour.

Colour is a very, very subjective thing in any event. I'm not saying that the off-the-shelf paints are wrong, just that they don't look right to me.

Right, back to having another go...more parts yellow I think, a friend of mine just emailed me saying it's a good match for Southern Malachite green!

I've agonised over unconvincing paint shades in the past too, but here's some of what you have to consider:
As any printed or electronically stored/displayed picture is likely to have colour error owing to the fact that before you get to see it, it has been manipulated by systems other than the human eye, I would suggest that attmpting to colour-match by reference to a photo is highly unlikely to produce success.
The most "correct" method for attempting to match "by eye" would be to do it by reference to a real sample of original paintwork, whilst working under North Sky Daylight, but even if you got it dead-on in those conditions it wouldn't necessarily look right under different lights as their spectral compositions will be different, emphasizing some colours in the mix relative to others!
If the proprietary suppliers have made their paints by actual reference to original recipes, and have used pigments of the original kind, then their results should be right, regardless of what they look like under modern domestic lighting as opposed to daylight or the awful light in certain museums and loco-sheds.
I gather that Phoenix Precision Doncaster green was made by reference to information supplied by the LNER Study Group, so it should (or at least could) be authentic - I believe Silverfox may confirm.
I find that even the "dull" version of this paint often goes on quite shiny, but once it is low-sheen varnished it is (to my eyes) almost identical in shade to Railmatch Doncaster green. The same match holds if you gloss varnish the Railmatch green and then compare it with the Phoenix stuff, so I suppose they must be equally acceptable. It's a shame that the RTR manufacturers don't consistently use paints that more-or-less agree with these two interpretations of Doncaster green, as that alone makes anything that you paint look "wrong" against locos straight out of the Chinese boxes!
I have now accepted that the two commercial versions that I've mentioned are as right as they realistically can be, and that locos painted differently by Hornby and Bachmann must either be shunned, tolerated as they are, or changed by weathering or a repaint.

The problem that I find with most model paints is that whereas they may have been mixed to the exact specification used for the real thing, because of the small areas to be covered on a model, they dont look quite right, or at least not to me.

They tend to look a little dark, and even the lining and lettering seems to make a difference to the main colour, especially on a tender.

Simierski wrote:I just don't think, based on what I know, and what I've seen, that any of the Doncastor greens look right to me. I can fully accept that everyone else may think me mad for trying this, but I like mixing paints ( ), and having a go. I wouldn't try if I didn't think it would look good enough with an off-the-shelf colour, but I simply don't think any of them have captured the colour.

Good for you. I also question the colours the paint manufacturers force on us. If they were right, they would match pretty closely the shades used on preserved stock. They don't.
Various excuses are given from "they are based on samples from Derby Technical Centre" to "they compensate for scaling". That would sort of imply that the shade for 4mm should be different from the shade used for 7mm!

This one could run for ever! May I just retell a true story of an event that happened at York in the late 60s. An eminent ICI paint specialist, who is also a model railway enthusiast, gave a lecture to members of the LMS Society and some mebers of the LNER Society (as it was then). He illustrated his lecture on colour perception parly by showing a model of an NER 4-4-0 in NER Green livery. The model was dispayed for about ten minutes while he talked and then put away. Immediately after it was put away he produced a number swtches of paint samples and asked the audience to identify the green used on the NER loco.

Despite the timescales there was only one member of the audience who correctly identified the colour, and one who had not previously realised that he was colour blind! Some 40 others were wrong and they were enthusiasts who rememberd the original colour from the 1920's with clarity.

Now there are many factors which affect colour and our perception of it, but if efforts are made to match to known original colour samples, unaffected by light, the elements etc, then I am happy that they should be used as a basis. The various colours were checked against the Munsell Colour system and there are minor differences between the Greens produced by Railmatch, Precision, the old Cherry Paints and the original Humbrol (if you still have some). Personally I use Precision because I had a hand in matching it back in the early 70's, but admit to lightening it for use on an older loco long out of shops and using different protecion finishes.

On the subject of scale colour, the paint should be lighter in the smaller scales. Most proprietory colours are best used in 4mm. 7mm would be marginally darker.

And this is all without mentioning the number, thickness and colour of priming and undercoats, the degree of smoothness of the underlying surfaces, the type and number of coats of varnish over the colours and so on. A splash of Halfords grey primer and a squirt of any colour top coat just does not cut it.

There's an article in BRJ No. 3 of Spring 1984 titled Painting L.N.W.R. Locomotives, The Recollections of a Crewe Painter, which describes the process of repainting a loco and takes 4.5 close-type pages to do so. It will not differ much from the other Companies. A read of Keith Parkin's BR Mk 1 Coaches, Chapter 5 Liveries & Numbering p. 44 et seq provides an interesting description of painting methods, changes in the materials and the problems that need to be overcome.

To add to 2512silverfox's example, it is said that when the ex-GE J69 was to be repainted in GE Blue as Liverpool Street Station Pilot, a set of 9 (from memory) different original colour samples on metal were produced from Derby, and a long-standing senior employee at Stratford Works asked to pick the correct shade.

Once paint colours were standardised and classified, under BS381, a scientific method (colorimetric values) was used to determine the relative proportions of red, green and blue to 3 decimal places and the shade expressed as a percentage for any colour, against standards set at the National Physical Laboratory. Paint manufacturers used to keep records defining the mix for any given product or order, and these cards still survive in certain places.

MikeTrice wrote:

Simierski wrote:I just don't think, based on what I know, and what I've seen, that any of the Doncastor greens look right to me. I can fully accept that everyone else may think me mad for trying this, but I like mixing paints ( ), and having a go. I wouldn't try if I didn't think it would look good enough with an off-the-shelf colour, but I simply don't think any of them have captured the colour.

Good for you. I also question the colours the paint manufacturers force on us. If they were right, they would match pretty closely the shades used on preserved stock. They don't.
Various excuses are given from "they are based on samples from Derby Technical Centre" to "they compensate for scaling". That would sort of imply that the shade for 4mm should be different from the shade used for 7mm!

That's pretty much my thinking Mike. Speaking to a few people in the know, and particularly one chap at the Mid-Hants who makes up the paint for their outshopped locos, I just can't see the similarity in the Railmatch paint, when wet or once applied, and dry, to anything like the shade of [insert colour here] that you see on the actual locomotives.

It's been said that Mallard (now at Shildon) wears a darker shade of blue than she would otherwise have had - but the colour scheme applied to the Hornby and Bachmann models is nowhere near each other, let alone the paint scheme she's currently in!

Further to that - there's only one model I think has replicated the paint colour of the real thing, absolutely perfectly - Bachmann's prototype Deltic, whose colour changes in light, as the real thing did in service, and does in preservation too.

I look up at my models in the cabinet, and there's SNG in BR blue, FS in BR blue, North British in BR blue, and then Tornado which is my own paint job, in the "same" livery. The only one which looks right to me is Tornado, but then I'm biased!

I do take the points on the research that goes into these paints, but if you're spending weeks/months/years on trying to make a locomotive look right physically, in the details of its build, then using a shade of paint you don't think matches up to the prototype is surely hypocrisy? Or am I being ultra nit-picky? (I think I might be, to be fair, but I still don't like the Railmatch Doncaster apple green anyway!)

MikeTrice wrote:Good for you. I also question the colours the paint manufacturers force on us. If they were right, they would match pretty closely the shades used on preserved stock. They don't.
Various excuses are given from "they are based on samples from Derby Technical Centre" to "they compensate for scaling". That would sort of imply that the shade for 4mm should be different from the shade used for 7mm!

And of course the major difference is that railway equipment is almost always see outdoors under natural light, whereas models are for the most part viewed indoors under artificial light that may or may not bear a passing resemblance to the colour values of natural light.

I believe that's more or less what I said earlier:

Atlantic 3279 wrote:even if you got it dead-on in those conditions it wouldn't necessarily look right under different lights as their spectral compositions will be different, emphasizing some colours in the mix relative to others!