Re: Era

Yes, Duncan and others did a great job of documenting the long effort and extensive work the project took. Also behind the scenes, a significant amount of background research was performed; the original project team looked for any information that existed in libraries of the Colorado Railroad Museum and the Pullman Library, among others. My personal speculation is they did more research on the car than any other project in FoCTS history. I am told they got the original paint formula from Pullman and translated that to modern paint technologies.

One thing all restoration groups don't often do as well is to document any decisions made along the way, and going back and updating previous documentation (such as Duncan's BLOG) as new information is found. I think you'll find that as more info was found, they decided that brown paint was not the exterior color.

Wednesday is my day to work at CRRM, and today I went over to DRGW 0250, the sister car to DRG 470, which had much the same history. The paint sample below (and still attached to the car) shows the drastic wood deterioration and definitely the last coat of MOW brown that Rio Grande applied. Can anything else be determined? I'm not going to speculate.

Last fall other volunteers and I spent a fair amount of time under and on top of the car doing a survey and other stabilization work. There is a lot of green paint showing in areas that probably wouldn't be touched during a casual repaint. Like up under the clerestory windows. At least Rio Grande didn't feel like painting over it when they applied the MOW paint in the 30's. So is it the original factory green-brown paint or the C&N paint? There is interest in restoring the car to a 20th-century era, so maybe at that time, a more extensive color analysis can be performed to ensure the correct shade of green is used.

Would the Colorado and Northwestern do a full repaint when they acquired the car when it was less than 15 years old? We're assuming they did, but nobody alive can tell us for sure. Lots of unknowns. The scholars will need to burn the midnight oil to come to a consenses.

My personal opinion is I don't like the color D&RG 470 that it was painted. I'd rather see it match the other historical cars on the C&TS, and a UPS Brown might be better. I think that as it is exposed to sunlight, the current green color will fade to a uchy share of brown, such as what happened when you tried to mix all your paint colors together in 8th-grade art class.

There have been times when a mistake was made on a FoCTS project, and once it was pointed out, they went back and did it over. Like when they put the "Royal Gorge" logo on 0579, which was the wrong era for the cupola configuration. Within a year or so, it was corrected with the flying Rio Grande. But there have also been times when the "experts" said a car was the wrong color, but there was evidence to show that the color was indeed correct. If we were all perfect 100% of the time, the world would be much different. It's better to admit a mistake was made and move on.

Bill Kepner





Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 04/28/2021 07:41PM by drgw0579.