Black and White and Red All Over

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A friend wrote in with an interesting question:

Q. I have attached 3 photos from the early 1940's available from the net. Although B&W, all three seem to show the blue color scheme without the front door and around the windows appearing to be red. Was this an earlier variant of the blue-red scheme? Was the front grey? Two show the 308 so painted and in the other the 318 seems to be similarly painted. There are also pictures on the net showing the 319 so painted at Trolleyville, but I know that they didn't care about "correct" colors. Could you explain the colors in these photos?

A. It's due to the use of different types of black and white film available at that time. They had different responses to various colors, and red in particular tended to vary. In one type red tended to appear very dark, in another type very light. Here's an illustration: look at these two photos.









These show the same car in exactly the same paint scheme. (They might even have been taken on the same fantrip.) In one, the red ends appear as light as the grey, in the other they're darker than the blue, nearly black. So determining the colors from a black and white photograph is not easy.

On the CA&E, the various paint schemes had different patterns of the different colors, and that's how we generally decide which paint scheme we're looking at.

Hope this helps!
hicks car works

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