Rail Brown? Seems Olive Green to Me

[Big Train]

Mission Models describes their paint as "acrylic non-solvent". It is airbrush ready from the bottle and MM recommends adding their thinner MMA-002 and the polyurethane mix additive MMA-001 at the ratio of 10 drops paint, 2 drops thinner and 2 drops polyurethane mix additive for application with an airbrush. In addition, you can brush paint with these paints also.

The polyurethane mix additive is a paint leveller/retarder that improves application. Though, you can spray the paint directly. MM sates that the paint is pure pigment and the addition of thinner and polyurethane mix additive ensures a long shelf life for the paint. It's unlike any other acrylic paint I've used before. This is different. When poured out of the bottle, it is thicker than I am used to but it does spray with my Badger Patriot at 10 psi well enough and can achieve very fine lines with minimum overspray. The big advantage is the reduction of dry tip and allows continuous painting for a long time before cleaning the needle. While I do like Vallejo, sometimes I have really good results, sometimes not. Some colours seem to be more prone to tip dry than others. Maybe something to do with how long the paint has been on the shelf?

Currently, their paint range is for armour and aircraft and there are colours we can use for model trains.

There are several YouTube submissions about this paint. But overwhelmingly, the opinions are very positive amongst current users.

[peteski]

Thanks for the info. So it does sound like a low-odor acrylic/urethane resin enamel.  But it has better adhesion than the MicroLux?  Interesting.

Also, I wish that the paint manufacturers (and modelers) would use more accurate terminology in describing paints. The description "acrylic non-solvent" makes no sense as every paint needs a solvent (that is what makes the paint liquid). They probably mean that they don't use stinky petroleum-solvents.

[Maletrain]

Also, I wish that the paint manufacturers (and modelers) would use more accurate terminology in describing paints.  The description "acrylic non-solvent" makes no sense ...

"Marketers" have been selling us "non-dairy creamers" for generations.  So, they seem to be quite good at getting us to buy something by telling us what it is not, without ever telling us what it actually is that we are buying. 

[Maletrain]

Getting back to the OP: 

I took the opportunity to look at some rail on a track paralleling the road I was stopping-n-going on for a while, remembering this thread.  Interestingly, in different locations, the same railroad track looked to have slightly different hues, including greenish.  Since it is winter, with nothing green in the vicinity to reflect that color, it must have been the rails, themselves.  But, wait, there's more: in other places it looked dark brown, and in one place it seemed to have a slight purplish cast.  The sky was an even overcast, so that should have made it look slightly bluish, but I did not seem to see that.  The road and track were monotinously straight, so lighting angle was not changing.

The trouble with all of this color recognition is that it is somewhat subjective.  The human mind attempts to compensate for the color of the illuminating light so that we tend to think "white" when viewing a panel we "know" is white, whether we see it in sunlight, incandescent light or flourescent light, which have bluish, yellowish and greenish spectrum shifts. And, on top of that, individual eyes may have slightly different color balance in their receiving cells.  (Try looking at something in full-spectrum sunlight and alternately closing one eye, then the other - - some of us will see alternating slight shifts in color hue.)

Because most of us don't have sunlight illuminating our layouts, even going to the real object outside and matching it to paint swatches will not necessarily produce the same apparent color when we use the color for the matching swatch to paint our layout details.

So, I think we are really stuck with trying to figure out what looks right to us on our own layouts.

All I can say about that is, at least for me, I need to actually go out and look at the color(s) of what I want to model, rather than try to remember or assume a color based on generic "knowledge."  And, even when it looks right to me, it may not look exactly right to others.

But, I do think I saw some "rail brown" looking color on some of those rails.