http://www.flickr.com/photos/67438684@N07/6800600485/

Here's a picture of it in ex BR condition, red buffer beams.

In the 1980's repaint we found yellow on buffer beams and, IIRC, a reference in Brownlie to LNER crane livery having yellow buffer beams.

I'm puzzled by the tones in the original b&w photo at top of this thread, how close white and (red?) are, that's why I mentioned yellow. If red guess it's a pale shade, like that on the crane at Mid Hants
seen below, will settle for that then.

http://youtu.be/k_EkHTFCZXU

Difficult to determine the original shade of red from pictures as red paint is very prone to fading of course; the Post Office Red on MP3 (95207) started to fade within months.

As I may have mentioned elsewhere, I discussed the problem of fading with paint maker T R Williamson who advised selecting a red containing a good proportion of orange. I chose Poppy from some swatches that they sent and discovered later (from old paint hidden by the springs etc) that this was an almost exact match with the shade of the paint applied by BR in 1973.

The paint on the buffer beams of the MHR crane seems to be either Poppy or a similar shade, judging from the photos that I took of it in 2008. It well meets the 1959 BR instruction to paint breakdown vehicles "bright red".