Ok, against my better judgement I'm going to wade into the green boiler jacket swamp. Hope I don't get bitten by an alligator! For what it's worth (and that's not much) I was trained as an Illustrator and have done some so called fine art as well. One of the things you learn early doing representational art is most people look but don't truly see what is there to be seen, especially in regards to color. Al Armitage had a great article about this in on old NG Gazette in 1979.
In this case it's a green boiler jacket, pump jackets, cylinder and dome centers. Top and bottom segments of each dome is black. The boiler jacket is shiny, and the engine must have been repainted recently. The top of the jacket you can see mostly the reflected color of they sky with greenish undertones. below you can see a greenish brown, as the shiny jacket here is reflecting the color of the running boards. the difference in color is most pronounced in the cylinder and especially the domes. Notice how the dome centers and end segments are not at all darker or lighter versions of the same color but entirely different colors in all lights and darks and reflections in centers and ends. also note the differences in the cylinder: aluminum front cylinder head cover, black rear cover,dark olive center. If anyone still doesn't see green here, then to each his own. This is a hobby. We can all agree most NG engines post 1920s were black.
The green here is very close to the color PBL paints its models. Railroad artist Gil Bennett once told me that Jimmy Booth was rooting around in the C&TS shop when PBL was in Chama and came upon a battered old can of paint labeled "boiler jacket enamel" in a corner of the shop. There was a bit of green paint left in the bottom, hard as a brick, and that's the color PBL uses today.
Gil has also made presentations on a person he calls "silver guy", mostly working out of Gunnison, at least he thinks so. By photos you can follow this silver happy painter around the railroad as the years go by. #453 with silver all over the place is probably this painter's most extreme work. Almost every major roundhouse had a painter in those days. I'll post an interesting discovery on the green jacket controversy on a separate post.
That's it fellows. Fire at will.
