This will be interesting to follow. I find it strange that there is no need to fade but you’ve got the pictures to prove that.
That’s the thing…almost all color pictures of boxcars-in service are steel boxcars. Most color pictures of wood boxcars are of retired and/or museum pieces. And museum pieces get TLC that the originals don’t get.
Was the paint formulation the same for wooden cars the same as for steel cars? I don’t know.
I know two things, well, three:
1. Remarks I’ve read about colors not fading and sometimes even darkening don’t pertain to all colors, but pertained to some reds & browns of the era. Lots of other colors get beat all to…well.
2. Lots of photos in the C& O Historical Society archives (cohs.org) would seem to bear this out. When I began looking in that archive two years ago, I was surprised at how vivid base colors could remain. This must be considered against photographic film accuracy of 1940s-1970s film accuracy. (Yes, the steam era ended in 1956 on the C&O, but lots of rolling stock made it decades longer.)
I look for tell-tale things in old pictures in evaluating “the likelihood (because there’s no 100% guarantee) of color fidelity”: a reasonably blue sky, green grass & foliage, and anything else either well or poorly rendered.
If the whole photo looks, say, sepia-toned for example, I don’t consider it representative.
Old railfan movie films seem to have worse color accuracy than still photos of like vintage.
3. Model manufactures, at least the better ones, and at least for the railroads I buy pieces for, (C&O, B&O, N&W, and a few other strays) apply colors that comport with what I see in the archives for newer cars: C&O is rather brown as “boxcar red” goes, N&W has more red, and B&O has more than either. Union Pacific (at least by the time a stray makes it to West Virginia) is a pretty straight brown.
Now the colors do change some… I think what is going on is fading of individual pigments that made up those paints. All three of those above railroads, the cars became “more red” over time, with the seams/rivet areas becoming reddish black, almost a purple hue over time. My guess is that black pigment is fading faster than red is in these paint formulations, and the color gets “brighter”, redder over time.
And you can see the differential rate at which pigments fade on interstate signs - those brand signs at some exits, showing gas/food/lodging brands -some colors fade at a noticeably faster rate than others. Not railroad paint, but you can see the principle in operation.
Do railroad paints fade more today , than did the paints in the days of yore? By and large, I don’t know: The ubiquity of the yellow Railbox is alien to my boxcar red lens through which I view the past world , and the black coal hopper doesn’t pay a call to the region I live in now. (Alas!) But with all sorts of chemicals/PCBs/hydrocarbons/VOCs of Death that were part and parcel of paints, varnishes & processes of old, having been restricted or banned, I wouldn’t be surprised.
