DAR Colours

[Dan Conlin]

Interesting bit of naming lore there. I guess they hadn't settled on Blomidon when they ordered No. 32.
I was curious what folks who have seen it think of the hand tinted colour photo of Locomotive 557 on page 350 of Omer Lavallee's Canadian Pacific Steam Locomotives. Omer seemed to feel it was a good contemporary depiction of DAR Tuscan red, but of course with hand tinted photos, you are dependant on the tinter (and whatever kind of red he had in his supply of watercolours). I do note that the photo has the cab roof black which is consistent with Graham McBride's memory.

Dan Conlin

[stem]

I have just expanded our wiki colour section (http://www.dardpi.ca/wiki/index.php?title=Colours) with more information and more categories on the page.

What struck me like a lightning bolt was the following thought:

While all you DAR hounds are out field tripping and photographing DAR assets (like stations) would it be possible for you to take out your penknife and find a good corner or cranny where there's still paint and chip away until you get a chip of an original colour that you can take home and scan in (no colour correction) and upload to the wiki for our colour section?

[Evangelineroute]

Steve,

We do not need to go too far to find the yellow used on DAR stations. Terry, our Station Agent at Middleton, told me that when they first set up shop in the station it was painted CPR station-red. When scraping the shingles to repaint they found "yellow" underneath so decided to proceed with their best estimate of the original colour.

Memory Lane might be a good place to start scraping for a chip to digitize.

Fred Deakin

[stem]

Now that's an idea to take note of Fred. Thanks for that information. I shall make the appropriate inquiries and see what can be done based on what you've mentioned here.

Off topic... but how's the DAR ships coming you told me about before?

[stem]

Hopefully enverybody got that Pantone chart I found on the net. A great tool for talking about what colours we are actually seeing as regardless of your monitor we can match colours this way in the CYMK range.

On the very first page in the upper left hand corner are the actual CYMK - Cyan, Yellow. and Magenta swatches. I think that the magenta in the CYMK scheme is NOT the same magenta that people report the DAR used.

If anyone is aware of common turn of the century antique items that might have been called magenta it would be interesting to see those items and grab some colour values off of them.

[stem]

I just spoke again last night with Janet Kroetch, the working director of the museum and she confirmed that the current station colour is an exact colour match taken from samples of paint chip removed from protected locations on the building. That mean we have a real colour sample of the "straw" yellow and dark brown used for all the stations at one time. Janet is going to send me the colour match numbers from the paint vendor and I will put the info on the wiki.