I want to have a large fleet of SR&RL friend cars, and all of them will need to be painted. Much discussion related to model colors has occurred in M2FQ, and on the various Maine two foot yahoo groups. The On2 FAQ site has recorded some of the most valued content for modelers to read, read the post on Tin roofs and colour schemes. However many of the recommendations are for older obsolete painted and/or complex mixes. So I decided it was time to find paints acceptable to me. My preference is for acrylic paints in an airbrush or spray cans.
So, I decided to do a number of test shots for my own evaluation. To do the shots I cut styrene sheet into 1.5×4″ pieces around the size of a boxcar side. Then I primer them with krylon great primer and finally sprayed them with the candidate colors. Here are the results.
Candidate colors for freight car red
Which one do you like? Rendering may not be accurate. Upper left of unpainted. Next is primer grey. The image below has them all flipped over so you can read the names.
Names of paints
It was Gary Kohler’s recommendation to use the dupli-color primers. I do like the results they give and will likely go with one of them for my SR&RL freight car red. If for nothing else they are in a spray can. I’ll probably not stick to one color for all equipment, as the color likely varied some over time. I’ll choose a roof color from there’s too. It may be same car sides or vary, time will tell what I do.
The paints used in the test shots
Sn2 Modeler 
Thanks for sharing your results.
I agree that the spray can colors are excellent. I tested a few of the hardware store spray bombs a year or so ago. To my eye, I prefer the Rustoleum 2X Flat Red Primer, and I like the way Rustoleum’s spray cans handle a little better than the others I tested.
Geren, thanks for the comments. To my eyes, the Rustoleum 2X Flat Red Primer is a dead on replacement for Testers Boxcar Red, which is not red/orange enough for what I want my SR&RL freight car red to be. As such, I’ll probably be using one or both of the Dupli-color reds for my SR&RL freight car red. I plan to do a few test shots on HO boxcars prior to putting paint to my Sn2 models.
My can of Rustoleum 2x flat red primer will contribute to painting standard gauge freight cars.
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