Ross Miller Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> Mr. Sperry-
>
> The green color on the D&S special makes me
> want to throw up, and has since I first saw it when
> Jerry Day posted photos of that special years ago.

Given Jerry's outspoken criticism of "Circus Colors", I was quite surprised at his enthusiastic endorsement of the D&S green coaches at the time.

> Cool special, seriously cool special.  Haggard
> green color. They totally missed the mark with
> that crappy green and I wonder where and how
> they came up with it honestly.  Yikes, big time.


Well, Ross -

Don't blame me – I had NOTHING to do with the painting of the D&S passenger equipment, nor the jacket of #473 – except that IIRC I had commented to the D&S Museum Curator / Paint & Lettering Chief Jeff Ellingson back in 2005 that the color of the jacket on "#472" (a MUCH lighter olive back then) looked a bit too light to my amateur eyes.  Here's "D&S #472" at Elbert Creek below Rockwood (aka 'The Little High Line') on August 25, 2005:




The story I have heard from Jeff is that sometime around 2006 or 2007, one of his crew found an old can of paint labeled 'boiler jacket enamel' in the former D&RGW paint shop storage shed, and Jeff took some of the dried out old paint from that can, had it spectrographically analyzed, and then duplicated the PIGMENT color as accurately as possible, but in a modern automotive urethane-type paint rather than a true enamel.  As noted several times previously, per Jeff this is the EXACT SAME PAINT that he used on the jacket of the RGS 2-8-0 inside the museum, on the jacket of D&S #473, on the D&S coaches and the baggage car (seen here on August 19, 2010):


. . . and which Jeff himself applied to the jacket of Rio Grande #489 on May 17, 2010, in preparation for 'Springtime in the Rockies' on the C&TS:


IMHO, this D&S replica "Moffat Green" looks about right on the 2-8-0 under artificial light inside the D&S museum, and indoors in the C&TS Antonito shop, but outdoors – being more reflective than the original "Moffat Green" enamel – it picks up too much color from the sky and appears a bit too blue / not olive enough on the locomotive jackets.  Also, SFAIK, the Rio Grande NEVER applied "Moffat Green Jacket Enamel" to ANY of its passenger cars, and to me it appears both much too bright and quite a bit too blue to replace "Pullman Green" for that particular use.

- Rüssell von Sperious und DunkelGrün

p.s.  I also agree that the 'Moffat Green Jacket Enamel' as re-created on #491 by the CRRM appears closer to the original D&RGW color, at least outdoors — and on boiler jackets, NOT on passenger cars . . .



Edited 3 time(s). Last edit at 09/26/2017 07:37PM by Russo Loco.