Paint colors

I've been saying this for a while. Take a look at an ATSF caboose track. 7 cabooses, 7 shades of mineral brown. Which one is correct? Some people get way to hung up on color. It's too subjective.

Interesting thank you for the post.
Would of made a great picture.
Guess the that the paint used was from a local supply and they just got what was close.
Maybe when the paint chips are used to match a exact color that it was on new rolling stock, not refurbished.
"Close enough was good enough"

Obviously, weathering, ultraviolet rays, and other environmental factors would have altered the paint shades after they had been in use for different times, and different chemical formulations of the paints over the years would have reacted in different ways as well. Also, there were some minor shade variations with different batches of paint, and railroads sometimes made changes to the colors they used on their liveries. However, railroads - or the paint suppliers they used - had paint formulas, specifically identified and numbered, to ensure that the paints used were as uniform as possible, and that the starting points for fresh applications were the same. There was nothing random about it. Here are the specific paints used by the Great Northern, for example:

I have read about this, most recently about handling paint issues on the Atlantic Coast Line during the purple paint era, and the effort and cost expended to maintain paints and uniformity. If one looks at pictures of passenger trains in their heyday, they show cars that are uniformly painted. They did not have multiple shades of yellows, or oranges, or whatever.  

The model train manufacturers should maintain strong standards for proper paint colors; a "whatever" attitude shouldn't suffice. That's not what the real railroads had. And some variations done by model train manufacturers over the years are just off the chart. For example, compare the MTH KCS F units with the real thing: 

breezinup posted:

The model train manufacturers should maintain strong standards for proper paint colors; a "whatever" attitude shouldn't suffice. That's not what the real railroads had. And some variations done by model train manufacturers over the years are just off the chart. For example, compare the MTH KCS F units with the real thing: 

The trouble is, even if you actually use the same paint as the prototype, it will appear "wrong" under most indoor lighting conditions.

The following locomotive matches the EMD color chip...  Outdoors. 

However, same locomotive, same basement, same camera, different lighting conditions:

Hint: The right image is the closest to the color chip...

Rusty

There are a lot of factors with lighting, that's true. There have been other similar topics over the years where posters have taken their engines outside in daylight to take comparison photos, just to eliminate at least some factors like florescent lighting.

However, this topic of paint matching came up some time ago (as it does from time to time), and at that time a friend of mine and I took his MTH KCS F units over to a KCS yard that's about 3 miles from my house, and we held the MTH version next to the real deal. The difference was pretty much like you see in my pictures above -  the MTH version was not close to the right paint shades.