My earlier purchase of most of the Model Flex green paints available at Discount Model Trains confirmed what I had suspected, that the Katy Green would be the best starting point to begin the matching process.  

Painted swatches from all of the greens revealed that ALL of them were darker than the green on my Floquil painted locomotives.  This meant that the first strategy would be to introduce metered amounts of white to the closest color--Katy Green.  I would use a clear plastic paint dropper to add the drops of white paint.

I found a sheet of Evergreen Styrene Plastic to use as my test bed to create color swatches.  Using masking tape in a grid pattern each color swatch had a roughly equal area on the Styrene sheet.

The first four test swatches had 3, 9, 18, and 27 drops of white added respectively.  These were all very dark and had little visible variance.

The next four test swatches had 41, 50, 60, and 70 drops of white added respectively.  The color pattern was moving in the right direction but was not quite where it needed to be.  The final four swatches had 85, 100, 115, and 130 drops of white added with the 130 swatch being very close to the green on T&GN SD60M 2493 used as the control in this process.

Chris

Referencing the dilemma mentioned previously about the demise of Floquil Paint, I have decided to search for a match to the green paint already used on T&GN and NT&O locomotives.  The pros and cons of looking for a new scheme vs. maintaining the same have been considered and I have decided that practicing due diligence to find a match is best.

Today I made a trip to Discount Model Trains in Addison, TX.  Scalecoat II is my current brand of choice, however, Scalecoat II failed to obtain license for sale in the state of Texas and thus is not available for sale in local hobby shops.  And that is too bad.  

The largest selection at Discount Model Trains is Badger Precision Design Model Flex brand.  Several months earlier I had purchased a bottle of their Katy-Green (16-80) and Olive Drab-FSC (16-96) and had experimented with different mixes of the two.  As it turns out the Katy Green by itself is not that far off from the original Floquil formula which was a 50/50 mix of MKT Green and Depot Olive.

Determined that the right formula had to be somewhere in the bottles on the shelves in this store, I purchased about a dozen bottles of greens as well as a few other basic colors to experiment with.  It is time to jump out of my comfort zone and learn to use a different brand and base of paint....

Chris