Reefer yellow? Which paint to choose?

[doctorwayne]

The car below was built from a Branchline (now Atlas) kit. One of two, originally lettered billboard-style for American beer, I simply wiped-off all of the lettering, using methyl hydrate on a rag. The car was modified slightly (I don't care for plastic grabirons and sill steps), and while the other car was painted to match a Northern Pacific prototype, this one ended up as part of the Grand Valley's motley roster of disparate GVEX (Grand Valley Export Ltd.) refrigerator cars.



The yellow paint is Pollyscale Railbox Yellow, with a few drops of either Caboose Red or Soo Line Red added. It mostly, sorta, kinda matches the other cars in the fleet, but I wasn't overly concerned about an exact match, since the other cars, some of which are shown below, were painted at different times and with various Pollyscale yellows mixed with varying amounts of, well, various reds...

This is a somewhat re-detailed Roundhouse (MDC) kit...



...and this one was built from an undecorated Rapido kit...



...and four of these Tyco cars...



...were converted into these...



I also have a couple of older Athearn cars painted and lettered for Fruit Growers Express. I don't recall at all what yellow was used, or if, or how, it was modified. About all I can tell you is that it was either Pollyscale or Floquil, and I tried to match it to an on-line photo that a friend had sent to me. It was of a wooden car in a museum, but who can say if the colour on my screen was true-to-life or matched the yellow color, missing its "u", in that U.S. museum....





Looking at the pictures, I do think that the wooden FGEX car needs some more weathering, though....it looks too much like a museum relic.

Wayne