Touch up paint for lionel scale daylight

This is going to be tricky- can you post some pics of the areas needing help?

You know that real locomotives, including the SP GS 4-8-4's, got banged up, dirty and shopworn.  Just look at these "flaws" as signs of maturity and character.

Pics attached. Just little chips, but stick out enough to bug me. Any advice on paint choice for touch ups?

Unless your touch up paint is a perfect match and you have a very steady hand and a professional pointed artist’s brush, your touch up work is going to be more obvious than the few paint flakes you are concerned about.

Good luck going forward, hope the touch up work goes great.

Jim

I agree with Jim's assessment on this- that's going to be tough to do and to do right- especially the one with the red. 

I have been down this road with SP engine colors and can say that the red (I think actually designated SP "Scarlet") is an easier match than the orange - not least because Lionel used its own idiosyncratic color mix. Also you have to bear in mind that the finish is not matte or gloss but more like semi-gloss. 

For the red I'd use Tru-Color's TCP106 Daylight Red; they also make a TCP107 Daylight Orange. These are meant to be airbrushed but if shaken thoroughly and applied quickly to a small area can be brushed on. Clean up with acetone as these are solvent-based paints sometimes described as "lacquer" but the formula is Tru-Color's own proprietary mix. Another airbrush paint (acrylic) that I have used for very small nicks is Badger Model Flex 16-36 SP Daylight Red. With the orange I found that it was necessary to look around for a shade that, whichever railroad it was attributed to, actually was a close match for a specific Lionel engine. 

I am not sure if you'll be able to find anywhere the old Floquil or PollyScale SP Daylight colors that were designed for brush application but they were fairly user-friendly.

I forgot to mention Scalecoat II, the subject of a thread that appeared yesterday, which also has bottle/spray  versions of SP "Scarlet", Daylight Red and Daylight Orange. These paints are very close to the prototypes so may not be an exact match for Lionel's colors.

I seriously doubt you're going to find an exact match.  I think you're going to have to settle for "good enuf."

Event the orange on the factory applied running board edge doesn't quite match the orange on the skirting:

Rusty

I had some nicks I touched up on the orange paint on my Lionel Daylight Legacy scale SD40, and also on the orange on an Atlas O Rio Grande GP35. For the Daylight orange, I found Tru-Color SP Daylight Orange (TCP-107) to be an excellent match - pretty much dead on - for the orange shade Lionel used on the SD40.

I don't know if the shade of orange used on the SD-40 (made years later) is the same as that used on your 4-8-4. I assume, if it's TMCC, your engine is the GS-2 no. 38079 cataloged in 2004 Vol. 2; it was the first scale GS Daylight Lionel made and the only TMCC scale one I'm aware of, all the others made after that being Legacy-equipped. I think the paint color will be very close, though, if not dead on, so I'd start with the Tru-Color. A little mixing may be necessary, though, as  I mention below.

I mention the Rio Grande GP35, which is a tough orange shade to match, because with that one I had to mix several shades of orange to achieve a match. Point is, you may need to mix paints to get the right shade, which can work very well. I just mixed drops from different shade of orange in a small plastic dish (used wooden toothpicks to pull drops out of the paint jars) and stirred until getting the right blend. I achieved a perfect match for the orange in this case. I applied the paint with a very small brush. Sometimes I use a sissors to trim off some of the hairs from a brush to get it really small.  

Carefully apply a tiny amount of paint so it goes on as flat as possible, so the touchup is less noticeable. With the small paint defects you show in your photos, I think the touched up look will be a satisfying improvement. I'd definitely do it.