Tom, it looks as if you were typing when Mark posted!
I have a VCR tape of N&W J 611 which includes her getting a full scrubdown at an unknown location. OTOH, in every shot of that big bullet on the road, she was wearing a full coat of grunge from the stack back, and white streaks around the pops and whistle.
Coal-burning steam, even well maintained, carefully run coal burning steam, didn't stay clean long. Oil burners weren't much better.
There was one photo, in a collection that has since gone missing, of a NYC Niagara steaming north on dead level track about twenty miles north of Harmon, NY - where I'm sure it had been washed before replacing the motor that had brought that train out of Grand Central. It was pretty cruddy. I can only imagine how quickly it would have gotten really dirty if the Hudson River Route had typical Appalachian grades.
Chuck (modeling Central Japan in September, 1964 - with some pretty grunge-covered soft coal burning steamers)
That's a tricky one. The first loco is on 'display', so there's no saying how long it took the weather to 'weather' it, since it isn't running. The UP Big Boy looks as if it's running out its last miles during the switch-over to diesel power, so UP probably wasn't too interested in 'cosmetics' --and all that black smoke is probably something that the engineer arranged with the photographer for a photo run-by, at least IMO. The Z-Challenger looks as if it has just pulled in from a long trip, which would weather it to a certain degree.
Most railroads during the Steam Era were pretty good 'housekeepers' and individual engine crews assigned to specific locomotives would usually try and keep them as clean as possible between runs.
Maybe MarkNewton will catch this thread and give us both some good information on this. But I would hazard a guess to say that the 'weathering' on most steam depended on how hard it had worked on its last trip.
I do remember watching Espee steam when I was a kid, and up until they were running the locos out on their last miles before the scrapper's torch in the early 'fifties, they kept their locos in pretty good cosmetic condition. After about 1954, however, a lot of them started to look like rolling junkyards.
Tom
Tom View my layout photos! http://s299.photobucket.com/albums/mm310/TWhite-014/Rio%20Grande%20Yuba%20River%20Sub One can NEVER have too many Articulateds!
How long would it take to weather a steam locomotive if the railroad would only do things to the locomotive to keep it moving. ( I mean, more than basic weathering )
Here are some examples of weathered locomotives. If you have some go ahead and post them.
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