matting Lionel Legacy Blue Comet with MTH rail king cars

Depends on which Railking cars you are talking about  If they are the ones that came in the Bantam set they will be dwarfed but if they are the standard 15 inch RK cars they look fine.  I have the Lionel Blue Comet pulling the RK cars  What I did was mix in a Premier Diner and Coach to make it look a little better

Colors being a little off really isn't a big deal as real trains would fade in service   Newer equipment would have different shades

However, in that case, the cars won't match the color of the engine, so the train still won't look very good.

Generally it's very hard to mix and match Lionel and MTH colored engines with passenger cars (and of course mixing the cars themselves) - the colors aren't going to be the same, in most cases.

My first experience with this was years ago - I had a Lionel N&W scale J (the first of those they made) and picked up some MTH passenger cars somewhere. Even with the relatively plain N&W maroon, there was a noticeable difference in color, with the maroon striping on the engine clashing with the color of the cars. I got rid of the MTH cars.

If you're running small branch-line passenger or mixed passenger/freight trains, more so.

But back in the day, railroads did not like to run a mishmash of different colored and aged cars with their crack name passenger trains. These trains were showcases for the railroads, and sloppy looking, off-colored consists made for bad publicity.

In reading about this, there were a number of quotes from various railroad presidents - some in very "colorful" language - about how they were not going to let their crack passenger trains look like anything but "spit and polish" in appearance.

I have the Legacy Blue Comet pulling a railking Blue Comet box car and (5) 16" railking pass cars .Looks Ok to me.My mainline is .054 and any thing longer than 16" does not look right on .054 curves

Railroads were in the business of making money.  Very few of the passenger train photo's I have in about 20 different reference books show "matching" car sets.  I've seen photo's of engine consists where the main color or striping were off just on the power.

The original, original Super Chief and the early 20th Century limited were exceptions during their early years of service.  After that you were lucky if the train actually made it through the wash racks.  Most of the photo's are posed "beauty" shots of inagural editions at some scenic point on the route.  Morning Sun and several of the other publishers have a lot of pictures of "working" trains where smooth side, fluted and even converted heavy weights are all running on the same train and colors/details varied car to car.

I might be considering getting Lionel's Legacy Blue Comet in the near future, and I already have all 7 of MTH's '98 run of the Premier passenger cars - if anyone has some photos, that might give all of us a better idea exactly how "off" the colors are.

Personally though, I don't mind colors being off just a tad between manufacturers. Though I have Lionel's Legacy GS-4 Daylight with MTH Premier passenger cars (which is something many people in the TM videos do) and the colors match rather well.

There were lots of mixes in passenger trains, that's for sure. I just like modeling the top passenger trains - such as the Empire Builder, North Coast Limited, City of New Orleans, Powhattan Arrow, Super Chief, Hiawatha, Calif. Zephyr, Coast Daylights among them. I have a number of books showing those "top of the line" trains in active service, and the cars are very well matched (in these books' pictures, anyway), or at least they were during the heyday of their passenger service. As an example (I'm a big fan of Ill. Central's City of New Orleans and City of Miami, for various reasons), in a book I have about those trains (streamliner era) the cars are so identical color-wise you can't tell them apart.

Whether or not the steam-era top passenger trains like Crescent Limited and Blue Comet, for example, were "dressed to the nines" fairly consistently during their heydays, I'm not sure, but I know the Southern's president Fairfax Harrison, for one - who brought the British-inspired green and gold colors he saw on a trip to England to the Southern's passenger trains like the Crescent during the steam era - was proud of them and demanded the finest appearances in everything. 

As times changed, though, so did the trains' appearances; money from passenger service got scarce, and so did uniformity.

I'm pretty sure there have been a number of threads about the Blue Comet.  I'm also pretty sure that the main issue with all of the recent sets is the cars aren't representative of the real train.  I would think that should be a bigger issue than the shade of blue.

I use Williams Reading 60' Madison cars with by Lionel T-1 and a Williams BLUE COMET consist with my MTH Premier BLUE COMET Pacific. They look fine. No one has ever complained. I like color window strips, so I installed them in both sets. They look even better, IMHO.

Like bluelineC4, I added a diner. A RailKing BLUE COMET diner matched my Williams cars. I also installed passenger figures. Passenger trains running with no one aboard bring back dismal memories of the 1970's.

wow, these are good and helpful thoughts.  I too run 54 radius curves and never thought the bigger cars would not look right.  I was hot and heavy for MTH for years after getting the proto 1 triple crown set until my dealer showed me the Lionel with smoking whistle and have not bought a MTH engine since.  The different sounds with Lionel helped as well.