Resources for Inspiration & Information

[basementcalling]

What sites are your go to places for prototype inspiration or information.

As I've been going down the hole of weathering based off prototype photos, I'm discovering that finding them is harder than actually weathering the equipment. Sites like RR Picture Archive make it pretty easy to find a specific prototype, but many car numbers are not in their picture archive. Sifting through car series one at a time isn't very productive, and too often a Google search doesn't turn up much other than listings of models for sale in various places.

I'm looking for a way to find a collection of "typical" weathering effects to use on those cars or engines not captured by someone and shared on our friendly internet without burning my eyes out on thumbnails or watching endless numbers of videos on Youtube, although the latter has yielded some cool screen captures for reference.

Anyone already have a system you use that works?

[wazzou]

LocoPhotos is a good one.   There is a sister site called RailcarPhotos.

[robert3985]

I go to www.utahrails.net quite often.  It's Don Strack's site and in the "photos" section, he has hundreds and hundreds of photos of mostly UP stuff from very well-known photographers such as Emil Albrecht, and others. 

Although many of the photos are of UP prototypes, there are freight cars, passenger cars, structures, and many other things too that help me out quite often.

Don also had information and photos for SP, WP, Rio Grande, Utah Railway, Amtrak in Utah, railroads that ran/run in Utah

Cheerio!
Bob Gilmore

[lock4244]

The aforementioned RailcarPhotos is great as it allows you to search by number series, but as in all things you need to filter through them car by car. Also, there's a lot of gaps in their coverage, typically the car you happen to be looking for 

FWIW, I like going through http://canadianfreightcargallery.ca when looking for freight cars. It's an excellent collection of pictures of cars from all over North America, but yeah, you're going down a rabbit hole of clicking one at a time.

[mdltrn]

http://photos.nerail.org/ is good for northeast stuff, especially New England.

[samusi01]

For some modern cars, I like Flickr - pretty awkward to find stuff but if you are after a particular reporting mark sometimes there are good images to be found. Example: for the HEMTT project, I used the these two searches frequently for reference photos:

https://www.flickr.com/search/?text=DODX&view_all=1

https://www.flickr.com/search/?text=TPDX&view_all=1

Sam

[mdltrn]

http://www.rrpicturearchives.net/default.aspx

Very good source if you need a reference picture of a particular locomotive or car road number

[mrhedley]

George Elwood's Fallen Flags website has been around as long as I've used the internet.  Surprisingly I rarely see it referenced on modeling sites.  Some of the material is quite old, but the site gets updated daily as there are a number of Rail Simulator users that share pics for their inventories. 

https://www.rr-fallenflags.org/

[jjb62556]

I go out an do a little railfanning or check out friend's layouts in the area...We have a lot in Twin Cities area...