New York Central Heavyweight Cars Paint Scheme: Pre-1953 Two Tone Gray? - Model Railroader Magazine

This link shows an excellent example of an air-conditioned Pressed Steel Car Co. coach that looks like it had recently been painted:

Harmon, 1966. Note the "sealed" windows and removal of the sash. I have paged through several of my NYC passenger books and have found a few examples of Heavyweight RPOs, Diners and coaches but they were not all that common.

Of course Henry Dreyfus is credited with the 1938 Century painting arrangement, which was modified in 1940 as management thought the look was "too busy".

The Century smoothside cars could also be found on the Commodore Vanderbilt (when the '48 cars came along the '38 cars were "generally" assigned to the Commodore Vanderbily and a few other trains. 

The New York Central even considered a two-tone green scheme but, not being very committed to the idea, only one side of two different cars (Cascade Vale and Imperial Palace) were painted this way for a short time in January of 1940. The opposite sides of the cars were painted black.

Then when the 1948 equipment came along there was a simplified gray scheme which also featured black outlining on the stripes and lettering. Later, around 1958 this later scheme was simplified again, eliminating the black edging.

In the 1950-53 period there weren't all that many Heavyweight New York central cars in two-tone gray. Keep in mind the Pullman pool service cars were an identical, or nearly so, paint arrangement to the NYC two-tone so if you have several Pullman sleepers you can certainly go with two-tone gray behind your Niagaras.

As near as I can determine the Pullman two-tone gray pool colors began to show up in 1945. 

I like to review the DVDs in my collection for ideas concerning operations. This Herron Video shows several NYC passenger runbys and you can get a good idea of the makeup of trains. You'll see a scattering of two-tone heavyweights.

Unfortunately, the person that uploaded it chose to add YouTube's "smoothing" application and it makes many of the scenes look like they were shot through a Lava Lamp!

I believe this was shot in 1955 or '56. For the most part the "secondary" NYC trains were a motley collection of heavyweights, lots of head-end, with a mix of Budd, P-S smoothside and stainless sheathed cars plus a few off-line through cars, notably U. P.

Good Luck, Ed