What color for that Souther Pacific "grey-ish green-ish" color?

ModelRailroadForums.com is a free Model Railroad Discussion Forum and photo gallery. We cover all scales and sizes of model railroads. Online since 2002, it's one of the oldest and largest model railroad forums on the web. Whether you're a master model railroader or just getting started, you'll find something of interest here.


malibu43

malibu43

Active Member
Hi folks,

I have an old HO scale Athearn Southern Pacific GP-35 with what I believe is referred to as the "Bloody Nose" paint scheme. I got this back before I saw any locomotives coming with plows already installed on the front (15 years ago), so I bought an HO scale plow from the hobby store, painted it flat black, and hacked the body of my GP-35 so it would glue in place properly. Doesn't look as nice as the ones I see comming out of the box with plows installed, but it works for me.

After pulling all my stuff out of boxes recently and setting it up, the black plow is really ugly and doesn't look right. Does anyone know what Testers/Tamyia/etc... color will match the grey-green color SP locomotives are painted with?

Thanks!
 
There are 2 lark gray colors. SP dark lark gray and SP light lark gray. It all depends on what unit your going to model.
 


I have found that using Polly Scale Guilford gray is a really close match to Athearn's SP dark gray. It's so close, I was shooting over factory Athearn SP gray, and could hardly tell where I was painting!
 
So, I went to the LHS at lunch, and they had both light and dark lark greys. Unfortunately, I forgot my GP-35, so we pulled a SP locomotive out of their case to compare against. The dark seemed to be the better match.

I ran home and painted up the plow on my GP-35. It wasn't a perfect match with the body, but since it was on the plow, it was hardly noticeable. I also touched up some spots on the body, and the color difference was much more noticeable, but it still looks better than the testors model glue that was smeared all over 20 years ago!

I also have an Athearn GP-9 that is newer and less used than the GP-35 (but still very old) and it looks like the dark lark grey would be a better match for that one. Of course that one isn't in need of any paint. Go figure.

So anyway, I'm just going to leave my touch up paint job as is for now. 1) It's not that bad unless you look for it, 2) it looks better than it did before, and 3) I don't feel like spending $5 for another jar of paint just to do more touch ups!

Here is a before and after (sorry for the different lighting and poor quality in the first pic!):

Before:
IMG_1212.jpg


After:
IMG_1220.jpg


Thanks for all your help!
 
malibu43 said:
Hi folks,

I have an old HO scale Athearn Southern Pacific GP-35 with what I believe is referred to as the "Bloody Nose" paint scheme. I got this back before I saw any locomotives coming with plows already installed on the front (15 years ago), so I bought an HO scale plow from the hobby store, painted it flat black, and hacked the body of my GP-35 so it would glue in place properly. Doesn't look as nice as the ones I see comming out of the box with plows installed, but it works for me.
Thanks!
Click to expand...

How funny. I think I did the same thing myself 15+ years ago. I bought 2 power units and one dummy, same HO scale Athearn Southern Pacific GP-35s. I think the power units were $35 each. I bought one plow for the front engine and it was a silver color. I just glued it on. Now I remember the hand rails too. They need to be glued or else they slide all over the place. Still have to do that.

Good to know about the paint though. Maybe I'll buy some more plows and paint them right. Thanks for the good memories.



MyReadingSig.png
 
Bat24SS said:
How funny. I think I did the same thing myself 15+ years ago. I bought 2 power units and one dummy, same HO scale Athearn Southern Pacific GP-35s. I think the power units were $35 each. I bought one plow for the front engine and it was a silver color. I just glued it on. Now I remember the hand rails too. They need to be glued or else they slide all over the place. Still have to do that.

Good to know about the paint though. Maybe I'll buy some more plows and paint them right. Thanks for the good memories.



MyReadingSig.png
Click to expand...

Yeah, my plows were silver too before I painted them!

FWIW I still have the boxes for my Athearn engines with the price tags on them... $26!
 
You must log in or register to reply here.




Affiliate Disclosure: We may receive a commision from some of the links and ads shown on this website (Learn More Here)

Back
Top