New York Ontario & Western Lionel Legacy F3's - Take Two

Grab rails installed by the O&W after delivery.   A road specific detail that  Lionel did well. 

RickO posted:

Heres another link that makes the MTH  look more "correct".  

Theres an ABA MU, and further down the page ,3 individual F units. None of which is even remotely close to Lionels powder blue:

https://www.american-rails.com/nyow.html

( Ironically,Lionels catalog illustration color looks pretty good)

I don't know Ricko but to me the first two photos of engine in your  link look more like the new color from Lionel to me.  I see blue tint there.

Don

I own the MTH NYO&W F3's, FT's, NW2 and GE 44-tonner. Right or wrong, the color is uniform across the locomotives. Also a member of the NYO&W historical society.

Rick

lehighline posted:

Stuart,

That is not a rectangle, but rather a set of grab irons. NYO&W added them later. If you look at the youtube video posted by RickO above, around 2:08, you can see the nose of an NYO&W FT unit. The grab irons are there, but in a different configuration. I have pictures of both the 500 and the 800 series with and w/o the grab irons.

Chris

LVHR

Thanks Chris.  That is a very different arrangement that I've haven't seen before.

Funny how Lionel got that detail correct, but screwed up the color of the paint and used the wrong number boards.

Stuart

RickO posted:

Heres another link that makes the MTH  look more "correct".  

Theres an ABA MU, and further down the page ,3 individual F units. None of which is even remotely close to Lionels powder blue:

https://www.american-rails.com/nyow.html

( Ironically,Lionels catalog illustration color looks pretty good)

The EMD Styling diagram at the end clearly is gray, not powder blue. Waiting to see the T&P units.

Has anyone else who ordered Lionel's F3's decide about what if anything to do with their REPAINTED "powder blue" or as I call them "robins egg blue" F3 sets?  The jury is still out with several of my customers.  So far, they say "too blue" and they look terrible when they are even near another NYO&W diesel by MTH Electric Trains.  See photos below....

I currently have full A-B-B-A sets in stock and discounted to $1440

How about the unpainted diaphragms?

Has anyone had any further discussion with Lionel about them?

I did not order these but I did get the T&P's. The new paint on the T&P's is way better but not 100%. The diaphragms are not painted on the T&P units either and look just like your photo above. 

They did not take the "A"s of the number board either. Stopping short from the finish line again Lionel.

The blue paint looks to be pretty similar to the color they used on the Lionchief Scooby Doo Mystery Machine EMD FT locomotives...

Well, its a mystery alright. A mystery as to why Lionel has had so many paint issues lately. Is it quality control? Is it not doing enough research to get it right. Or do they just not care, and figure we are going to buy it anyways because it comes in an Orange & Blue box?

It is a simple phone call or e-mail to a Railroad historical society. A lot of them have paint chips or the paint code for the colors that the Railroads used. I have the paint codes for the O&W engines. Was not hard to get at all.

I have just seen this old commentary on the fiasco of Lionel's NYO&W F unit paint:  Let's see it's  Silver,  no blue, no Aaagh....  off and into the abyss!  

The real issue with "what color was it" is oxidation. The individual who supplied the 116's paint chips was not taking into account that Dupont Dulux alkyd enamels (the original paints EMD used) very rapidly faded. The 116's 1987 repaint is kinda-sorta O&W at best, much too light actually.  So let's just not go there as a bona-fide source, t'isn't.

I have photos I took back in 1978 of another former NYO&W NW2 (the number now escapes this aging mind) when at the D&H's Colonie, N.Y. shops. The PC black was showing a good deal of the O&W's original paint colors.  The yellow faded the quickest to a cream, followed by the gray which in reality was a "chalking-out" of the gray leaving far more of the blue than when freshly painted.

The fundamental problem here as with almost all railroad "grays" is they're of a mired spectrum. 

Erie Lackawanna gray had a great deal of green in it.  I well remember that from my youth along the Delaware Division.  Oddly so does the O&W's gray.  But it was a considerably darker gray than E-L's , but  visibly green-ish... but only when fresh!   The reason was the yellow component of this green cast very quickly fades, even disappearing completely, leaving a bluish-gray.  As Hal Cartsens often related to me, over time as seen with the O&W's FT's stored in until 1966 at Secaucus, N.J. and long after the O&W's abandonment, the gray faded to what he insisted was a distinct;  Powder Blue.

When I was doing color matching for Athearn while in China for their Genesis F Units, the sky was so laden with pollution it was genuinely brown and sunlight as my usual light source was actually useless.  Their fluorescent lamps had far more of a green component than I was used to the point that it was useless to try.  I ended up having to wait until I got back over here. 

On the O&W F3's, I added a very slight touch of blue to the O&W 's colors as that is how they appeared after only weeks or months after painting, but for years thereafter. That said,  the Chinese manufacturer added still more blue, so Lionel's plight isn't exclusive to them. Kindly realize, I was using the actual 1940's EMD color chips for all of this work.  I even had samples of AT&SF "Warbonnet Red", GM&O Maroon, literally all the colors used.  Did you know that GM&O "red" was identical with Santa Fe's red?  Or that the  C&EI's shades of orange and blue were identical with those same exact colors used on the CNJ's F's?  A lot of overlap.

As someone here suggested, perhaps rather than unloading your Lionel F3's ...why not have a professional custom-painter do batch run for all of youse guys on here, younno, those of yuh who wants it done right?

Super 7,

Thank you for posting the O&W  paint colors. It is not just the paint that is the issue. It is also the fact that the Diaphragms are Grey???? and that they put an A in the number boards. That is incorrect also, even thought a lot of people had pointed this out to Lionel it was wrong before they announced they were going to run new shells.

The new shells have a very East egg look to them. They would be right at home sitting in a basket with some Cadbury chocolate eggs next to them.

My hope is that some day I will be able to find a used set of MTH O&W F3. They are not perfect, be I feel I would be happier with them.

We give up.  Our loss is your opportunity!  After making a considerable investment, we have decided to sell off the remaining stock of Lionel Legacy New York Ontario & Western F3 A-B-B-A sets below our wholesale costs.  These sets arrived from Lionel originally painted silver and now have replaced (REPAINTED) "blue" shells by Lionel and sealed in original boxes as received from Lionel's customer service department.  This is a clearance sale, so all sales are final (no returns).  See photographs of sample repainted locomotives below.

Order conveniently on our web site here:

https://jrjunction.com/product...w-f3-a-a-diesel-set/

https://jrjunction.com/product...yow-f3b-821-powered/

https://jrjunction.com/product...5-nyow-f3b-822-bass/

Purchase the entire set for only $1228.50     YOU SAVE OVER $371.00

I grabbed the ABBA that Alex M posted for sale a few months back for $700.  I even got the extra silver shells, they will soon be painted in either PRR or Reading colors, still deciding which I need more.   There's a good chance that the second set of shells will be painted as well once I have the first set done.  The shells swap very easily, so having two road names I like in the correct colors would be a bonus.

@gunrunnerjohn posted:

I grabbed the ABBA that Alex M posted for sale a few months back for $700.  I even got the extra silver shells, they will soon be painted in either PRR or Reading colors, still deciding which I need more.   There's a good chance that the second set of shells will be painted as well once I have the first set done.  The shells swap very easily, so having two road names I like in the correct colors would be a bonus.

Same here. I've got an AA that I'll repaint PRR.