Home Page › Forums › Prototype and Historical › Locomotives & Other Motive Power › What color is a MP smoke box and fire box › Reply To: What color is a MP smoke box and fire box
Coal burners are a bad engine to use for original colors in most photos. Only when they came out of the paint shop were the real colors obvious. Coal soot gets all over everything, changes colors or covers them completely. So, if you paint you can vary the smokebox and firebox colors and no one can call you wrong. I mixed Scalecoat grafite with varying amounts of #10 black and some loco black colors. Even mixed some silver with #10 black.
Rods: some roads such as T&P tried to keep them clean but most did not. I am remembering many photos of H K Vollrath in Shreveport as examples and Roger Plummer also showing clean rods. But, there are some pictures of some not so clean rods too. And, some roads such as the DM&IR and the Santa Fe painted their rods white. While the DM&IR kept them fairly presentable the Santa Fe did not.
