Liveries!

Don't worry about it Simon although if the real LNER were still around they'd have you on their payroll!

 

The wartime livery for the GWR was unlined black for freight engines and unlined green for everything else. I assume they had a good stock of green paint! I don't think any Kings were painted in the early experimental BR lined black that eventually became the standard for mixed traffic locos

 

The instructions from April 1942, which are mentioned in the link above, state that Kings and Castles were to be plain green, and everything else black, including Stars. I think there may be a record of one or two Castles being in black, certainly one of them at least ran with a black tender. It can get a bit confusing after the war; as you can imagine things didn't just go straight back to normal, some engines were being painted back into green, but without any lining. There's an ex-works photo of a Star from I think, 1946, like this, which may be why there is an assumption that they were like this during the war. Wolverhampton was still painting stuff black up till nationalisation, although I can't remember if all their engines were treated this way, or just the 'lower orders.' There's an interesting article about it in one of the GW Journals.

 

If you find any pre-war colour photos of GW locos (see e.g. Colour Rail) they tend to look almost black anyway. I think this may have been a lot to do with the early colour film.

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The paint back then used lead chromate (yellow), which would have darkened with age, not something that is an issue these days. You are right though that the films of the time would have had an effect as well, depending on which type was used. I have an image on my laptop of 5192 which I suspect is from a Dufaycolor slide, and the green looks much brighter than it does on contemporary images shot on Kodachrome.

And, dare I say, the engines were probably not kept as clean as people like to think...

 

Yes, I think all of those effects were at play. Plus, of course, the light, when it comes to photos.
The same is true for the other companies: LMS red can look anything from chocolate brown to pink in pre-war photos, and even where the colour is clearer, the locos are sometimes rather shabby, even passenger types like Jubilees... Although it would appear the Scots and Pacifics were cleaner (or maybe people only photographed clean ones: that's the problem with photographic testimony...)

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I've said this before, but speaking as someone whose job once involved industrial colour matching, I'm constantly surprised by the amazing memory enthusiasts have for colours. If I'd been half so good I'd have saved an awful lot of time I spent with test plates and reference samples.

 

Didn't you know that my memory is perfect, but everyone else's is error-prone...

 

Two more confusing factors, which should not be ignored, are:
- the effect of viewing pictures on computer monitors or TVs, which have their own limitations, and
- the fact that two things placed side by side can match under one light source and not under a different light source.

Edit: corrected a typo.

 

I remember there was a feature in Backtrack many, many years ago on this subject. In the "old days" of the Research & Development Centre at Derby they had several panels painted with different types and colours of paint that were kept outside to see how they "weathered". One thing I recall is that they used the same specifications through out for the maroon used by the Midland, L.M.S. and British Railways on the Duchesses. Many though were most insistent each shade was different, but no........ One thing though periodically when "management" weren't looking these said sample panels would be repainted with the latest shade of whatever colour it happened to be .

 

Some years ago now I was involved in showing a model railway layout at an exhibition at Eastleigh and a couple of us ended up chatting to an older guy in the public crowd. He regaled us with tales of his time spent in the paint shop in the carriage works. Inevitably the conversation turned to vehicle colours and he reported that during his time the works was still mixing their own paints. The specifications for these included things like so much of X, so much of Y etc - and "a bit of black".

What constitutes a "bit"? It turned out this was down to the judgement of the paint shop foreman on the day and hence varied depending on the personnel involved and sometimes even their mood on the day. Hence any particular colour was actually subject to a relatively wide spectrum of final appearance. If you then factor in things like the different levels of weathering due to different environment exposure you can see that a rake of stock would rarely appear uniform.

So which colour is "right". I would contend that it is almost impossible to say - and certainly not to be dogmatic about it. People may say they have found colour samples and matched paint to that but who is to say where in such a variation any given sample lies? And colour matching is dependent on the colour perception of the individual doing the matching. For instance, it is stated that the famous GWR loco green changed in 1928. As far as I know no-one has ever come up with any documentary evidence for that. Paint samples may exist for either side of this date and I assume they are different and form the basis of such a statement but in circumstances such as above that is no surprise - in what was in theory and officially the same paint!

As has been said colour photographs are of no help nor is individual memory. All someone setting out to paint a vehicle can do is use a colour that looks right to them. Almost inevitably someone will tell them it is wrong. My point is that they can almost never have a proper basis to do so.

 

The arguments about colour do tend to over look the point about the variation in people's perception of colour, touched on by Jimc.
My Grandfather was a printer and the firm he was a Director of printed very high quality stuff for the mass market. I'm talking into the 100's of thousands to millions. He was working in retirement because of his ability to perceive very fine differences in colour. I seem to have inherited this quality and have seen subtle differences in colour on rolling stock.
So the relevant points are, our vision may not be good enough to really see the colours, our memories might be faulty, colour images may be poor to start with or have changed, there were differences originally or changes over time and modern displays may render colour inaccurately. There is a Tom Scott vid about the pinkest pink, which doesn't really show up well on a computer screen.
It's a bit like middle aged people with hearing loss (me!) going on about hi fi. Not me.
It all makes the discussion moot in my opinion.

tl;dr Too many variables to be certain about accuracy.

 

Just on colour - I unfortunately have a red colour deficiency in my sight. It's not quite fully colour blind but it does mean I have problems with identifying shades of red.

The test I did for Network Rail showed however that I see blues and greens much more clearly and can see very subtle variations. To the extent that I have provided a couple of colour swatches recently for paints I have mixed up to petrolhead friends and model railway clients for certain colours.

I claim no expertise or training, but the different projects I have been involved in during the years has allowed me to realize that colour is both very important and very subtle. There's also other things - has it been painted correctly? We recently changed the numerals on the cabside of '28 and it makes a difference to the perception of the lining out and their colours, I feel.

 

I think many overlook this colour "blindness"; whilst many are aware of the "red / green" colour blindness that prevents anyone becoming a driver they are not aware of similar difficulties such as that of a friend who can only see shades of green as shades of grey. I presume that many will have similar colour variations that are both less obvious and less problematic.

 

Some form of colour vision deficiency affects one in four males, including me but only one in 400 females and no one knows why.

 

Well, we kinda do, in so much as most of the faulty genes that cause colour blindness are located on the X chromosome, which men only have 1 of but women 2, so women need both of them to be wrong to experience most forms of colour blindness.

 

Gregor Mendel says Hi!

Tom

 

Oh, Brother, I need a pea .....

 

One thing that intrigues me in all this is how certain colours look like a surface treatment, whereas others, whether it is the shade, or the quality of paint or whatever, look much deeper. LNER apple green, as applied to 4472 in the 80's looked like a thin surface layer, whereas 6229 looks as if it is machined from a block of "red". Am I mad? I see it with cars. A dark blue audi looks as if you could cut it and it would be blue all the way through, whereas a grey nissan is just a thin coat of grey on some tin. Its not simply the colour, there's an apparent "depth" in the finish that is not physical. What makes the difference?

On the subject of male colour blindness- I see women agonising over the choice of what I call "cream" paint. They have the Farrow & Ball paint cards (this is Bath, after all) and there's about 60 variations of cream, and to me they are virtually indistinguishable. I can see its not white, but..... I honestly believe women can see far more colours than me. The daft thing is, when I provide the paint, they like it. I get shown a photo in a magazine- say a brick building with off-white doorframe and a dark green door. I get shown 20 different off white swatches to choose. I buy rustoleum semi-gloss white and gloss hunter green and its always "perfect, exactly the right colour"

 

You're lucky on the paints - debating whether certain greens (adjacent to each other on the F&B colour card) were too "blue" or "yellow" was painful.

But I completely follow your logic on depth of colour - some paint finishes do make me think the colour goes all the way through, whereas others look laid on. I don't find it a question of colour (my memory of the apple green finish on 4771 c. 1992 is that itlooked much more robust that 4472 around the same time) but some other quality in the paint. I assume undercoats will be part of it, but there's something else too.