You'd get the odd one as grubby as that - but as you suggest - very few! My recollections were that carriages on Limerick - Ballina and the Cobh branch tended to look the tattiest - though possibly because they were often the oldest still in use.
I like your tin van - mine were deliberately done as filthy as the worst photos of them show! - though Silverfox - despite being told over and over again - insist on painting silver vehicles with a black roof - they should be silver - and green ones with a grey roof - THEY should be black!
I have a Silverfox tin van which I asked for in green. It arrived in a very dark UTA green - which is even too dark for the early CIE green which they never carried anyway - and with a pale grey roof. I'm going to have to get it repainted.
Not often I rant about a manufacturer - but for the prices this really isn't good enough. I have advised SF on several occasions about correct livery details for Irish stuff, but it seems to fall on deaf ears.
Mind you, a laminate in Chinese National Railways livery would still look well on Gort!
Correct. Anything - locos, coaches, PO vans or tin vans, which were put into traffic as silver, had silver everything - chassis, bogies, roofs, the lot.
Anything green - in either the earlier or later green - black roofs. In black'n'tan era of course all roofs black anyway.
The UTA, in contrast, had mid-to-dark grey roofs on THEIR green livery.