Re: "Hoist by one's own (green) petard" * (pic)

Jeff Taylor Wrote (more or less):
===================================
> I disagree.   Its black.   What I see is a
> clean freshly-painted loco and the jacket
> (The smoothest surface on the loco) is
> reflecting the sky.  The dome castings -
> being castings - will always look darker
> because they are castings {which} are
> naturally a rough and reflect light
> differently ...


Well, Son** -

Whereas I do agree that castings are much rougher than sheet steel, the dome castings in question have so many layers of paint on them that their roughness is hardly a factor.  And rough or not, the domes aren't even reflecting enough BLUE sky - much less any green - to show in Mr. Kindig's photo, even though the angle is more upwards than the sheet metal wrapped around them.  The difference in color between the wrappers and the tops of the domes is MUCH greater than can be explained by the difference in reflectivity between the (green) wrappers and the (black) tops.

To further illustrate my point, here is a photo taken at Knott's Berry Farm on October 17, 2009, showing both an all-black loco and a two-tone loco - the green of the latter presumably being as close to D&RGW 'Dark Olive Green Boiler Jacket Enamel' as the highly respected historic restoration team at Knott's was able to obtain:


Note that even with lots of bright green trees around - and a blue sky to be reflected - the shiny black loco still looks black and the shiny green loco looks green.  If one takes into account the high-contrast nature of the Kodachrome film which Mr. Kindig most likely used for his photo and the extremely high contrast (and glare?) apparently added by the scanning process, the differences between the jacket color of #318 in Montrose and #340 in Buena Park are negligible.

- "Papa" Roosso

    * "Hoist by one's own petard", IIRC, is an archaic expression which - so far as I can determine from my Merriam-Webster dictionary - means "blown up by one's own explosive device" (a 'petard' being "a case containing an explosive to break down a door or breach a wall" - sorta like the bomb devised by Saruman to breach the wall of Helm's Deep in Peter Jackson's film 'The Two Towers') ***

  ** Mr. Taylor, along with two of his fellow railfans from SoCal, was subjected to your's truly's attempt to marry one of them off to a very attractive waitress at Lady Falconberg's Barley Exchange in Durango a few years ago, on the premise that all three of them were his sons, but looked quite different due to their each having a different mother ...         I'm referring to that grumpy-looking apprentice curmudgeon in the front row - the one with his arms folded - he was one of the three for sure, and IIRC the fellow blocking the engine's number plate was also:


*** In spite of the obviously close connections between the mines of Middle Earth and those served by the D&RG(W), it is highly unlikely that the antipodean Tolkien films will be covered by any of Larry Jennings' "Hollywood's Railroads" books.



Edited 5 time(s). Last edit at 02/20/2015 11:58PM by Russo Loco.