Rich,
Champ decals for road diesels like the GP-7 were red outlines applied
over whatever gray you use to paint the tops. Because the gray was surrounded
with black, that means painting the black, them masking the stripe area and
painting it gray, them applying the red stripe decals. The down side is that
it’s tedious and exacting, but the upside is that the strip gray matches
the top gray. I don’t have Champ switcher decals, just the road diesel
decals. I think I could live with a small mismatch in lieu of the masking
and painting required to use Champ decals.
Huge variations in CB&Q gray occur with RTR diesels from the same
manufacturer over the years. My early P2K GP-7 and SD-7 are classic examples
where the GP-7 is way too dark and the SD-7 is way too light. When I used
ModelFlex CB&Q Gray to repaint the tops, the tops didn’t match either
stock gray stripes, being somewhere between the two extremes. I can darken the
SD-7 strips with weathering, but there’s no effective way to lighten the
GP-7 strips, and they are visibly much darker than the CB&Q gray. The red
and yellow stripe colors also vary markedly between the GP-7 and SD-7, so
clearly Walthers is not paying attention to prototype color chips, nor are they
worried about color consistency between releases. The gray on the new P2K
SW-900/1200 is almost blue. To my eye, the Stewart/Bowser VO-1000s come closest
to prototype Q colors, though the gray is still a little too dark. Some
manufacturers work with historical societies to approximate prototype color
chips, so why can’t this be done for the Q? We have one of the most
distinctive switcher color schemes in railroading, and yet none of the
manufacturers paint colors are either consistent or close to prototype colors.
Nelson Moyer