Looking for info: historically correct motive power

[Chacal]

I'm not sure where to begin with this search.
I'm sure this information exists in the numerous rail fan sites on the net, but I'm not even sure on what English search terms I should use.

For each NA RW route, I want to make a list of what railroad and motive power would be prototypical for a given time period.
So if someone wants to write a scenario for, say, Horeshoe curve in 1978, he would know what rolling stock in what livery to use.
Anyone has an idea?

[johnmckenzie]

This will be a fantastically useful tool for us Brits! Thank you very much!

And if anyone's ever interested, I can do the same for UK railways for you!

[PapaXpress]

Your best bet would be to buy some books. I have several 'reviews' for SP as well as equipment rosters. This gives me a snap shot of what SP's fleet was like at a give period. The second source would be a site like http://www.rrpicturearchives.net/ where you can search by road name or location.

[Bananarama]

The locomotive rosters would only tell you what the railroad had, but not whether they were used on a particular section of railroad. Many railroads had locomotives that they kept captive to an area or would not allow that locomotive over a certain section of line, usually due to reliability issues. Dan's comments about the books and rrpicturearchives.net is spot on, with the books giving more of why something was done. You could also contact various railroad historical societies or visit their websites for more info.

[PapaXpress]

Hack, the question was not about location but of what time period. With the search idea, you could plug in a location as see what pictures were taken at a given year.

[philmoberg]

Actually, Marc's point about location is a very valid one for some of the larger properties, such as the PRR. In the Pennsy's case, locomotives from a range of builders could be found pretty much all over the system in the late-'40s and into the '50s. By the late-'50s, Pennsy began to concentrate locomotives from the minority builders (Baldwin and Lima, as well as BLH after they merged) into a decreasing number of divisions, initially for the purpose of managing the spare parts inventory more efficiently. The last of their Baldwins I saw was one of the light roadswitchers, in a PC broom job, working a local freight in northern Delaware, a couple of hours away from where it had been built. NYC similarly concentrated their Baldwins - particularly the Sharks - in the last few years. By the mind-'60s, I remember at least most of the NYC's Limas in the Chicago area. UP tended to concentrate their turbines and large diesels (the DDs and the U-50s) around Sherman Hill for at least most of their working lives, according to a cousin of mine from out that way who worked for one of UP's big customers. The New Haven's DL-109s disappeared from the Shore Line and the rest of the system, to be concentrated on Cape Cod commuter trains in a matter of a few weeks when the first FL-9s were delivered in the mid-'50s.

[Chacal]

Thanks guys.
In the long term, I want to gather this information into a database of RW rolling stock, with data such as type of car, type(s) of load(s), weight, length, railroad, picture, provider, etc.

This would serve two purposes:

1- a reference for route and scenario builders (especially if we start to put more period assets in scenarios, as suggested by NDORFN). This would go into our "RWA developer's guide" section. For this purpose, it would help also if route builders documented the industries in their routes in terms of inbound and outbound cargo.

2- a tool for swapping rolling stock, so that a player could easily find compatible rolling stock in the database before swapping with RW Tools. This would go into our "information for beginners" section

[OldProf]

That's an extremely useful project! As a scenario writer who is also an historian, I often wonder when the time comes to assign a year to my latest project whether I've selected rolling stock correctly. Are the user's manuals provided by RSC and other payware providers of any help at all?

Thanks for taking this on!