Steam locomotive paint schemes

[Anonymous]

When I see pictures of steam locomotives from the Reading Company, the engines are painted black. When I go to the railroad museum of PA and look at the Pennsy locomotives, they are all black as well. But all of the major manufacturers of model trains are now painting the nose end of the locomotive grey and the rest of the body black. What's up with that? In real life did they have grey paint for the first 20% of the locomotive and then the rest was painted black? Lionel, MTH, and K-Line all paint the new locomotives that they put out with a grey nose end.

Dan R.
Lancaster, PA

[mersenne6]

It was called graphite paint - a mixture of graphite and oil. The smokebox and the firebox are the two hottest parts of the steam engine. The rest of the boiler had lagging covered with sheet metal. The sheet metal could be painted with paints typical of the day, however, the smokebox was too hot and the heat would have just burnt off any other kind of paint - leaving the smokebox metal exposed. If you examine old B&W pictures of engines in their clean state you will typically see a difference in the gray of the two areas. If you are looking at a picture of a locomotive while it was in use there is a good chance that the combination of soot and grime would give the impression that the entire boiler was the same color.

[palallin]

The gray is supposed to represent the graphite coating applied to the smoke box (and fire box) of many steam locos. Most steamers' boiler jacketing didn't extend far enough forward to cover the smoke box or far enough downward to cover the lower firebox sides and pan. The "paint" applied to those areas was a graphite/oil mix designed to minimize rusting and resist the high temperatures. It's lightness/darkness relative to the paint on the boiler jacket was subject to all sorts of variables, to include composition, weathering, age, amount and quality of daylight, and the actual color of the bolier jacket paint (the Pennsy, BTW, often did use green for its boilers, as did the T&P).

[Anonymous]

Not all steam locomotives had bare metal on the area that had the smoke exhaust inside of it. The reason for the oil and graphite is for rust prevention, on the bare steel, visablility etc. You see regular black paint would not handle the high temps of the bare steel.
Now some engines like the milwaukee 261 and santa fe 3785 had lagging all the way to the front of the boiler and smokebox so they got black paint all the way to the front as the lagging kept the metal from gettin hot and also insulated the boiler.
Most static restorations are done as cheap as possilbe and many times are very incorrect. Go to your local library or get a good book collection on steamers. Then when an engine gets anounced, look it up in the book and if it doesn;t look right and you are fussy like myself, do not buy it.
If you live in Minnesota, you can do a library search for almost any lib book on steam by going to, www.minlink.org" sign is as a guest and type in the railroad you want, copy the page of the book you want and take it to your local lib to get it on loan. I did that with the Penn k4 that 3rd rail brought out and found it to be on the nose, so I purchased it. Dave Roxin.