Depends on your prototype

In my case, I'm modeling the Southern Pacific, affectionately called the Espee - and there's a fantastic prototype info site on the web: 

http://espee.railfan.net

Richard Percy founded and maintains the web site - it's an absolutely amazing resource for prototype SP information. If this was available as a hard copy publication, it be thousands of pages and would cost hundreds of dollars - and to think it's basically free over the internet!

If there's someone on the planet with a passion for your prototype - then thanks to the internet, there's likely a tremendous online resource available for FREE.

And of course, Google is your friend!

Prototype research

For locomotives and rolling stock my primary research challenge is

1) Paint scheme in use on a particular piece in a given year.

2) Location of motive power for a given year.

Its not hard to find pictures of rolling stock and locomotives, at least for my prototypes. Whats hard is finding the particular year and/or location I am modeling..

The part of my research I find the most challenging is finding information and images of online industries for a particular year. Even more difficult is finding information about how the industry was switched and what went in and out. There is databases available but I have found them to be of dubious value after I did some real research on the areas I was looking at.

My best resource is images I can find online. However, prior to the 90s people didnt have digital cameras and scans of older slides are much less common. Its one of the reasons I keep feeling a tug toward a modern prototype.. ease off research.

Hope this was the sort of info you were looking for.

Chris

Prototype Research

I understand what you are saying and agree with most of it.

I've been researching my own prototype New York Connecting Railroad with the Bay Ridge Branch and the former New Haven Railroad lines in the Bronx and Connecticut. There is alot of information and photos available on line plus I have the extra added advantage of living near alot of the tracks that were and still are used in 2009. Of course alot has changed since the tracks of the Bay Ridge branch belonged to the Long Island Railroad when it ran freight opearations and were also used by the New Haven as part of their partnership agreement with the Pennsylvania Railroad.

The tracks are now used by the New York & Atlantic which not only runs the portions I am modeling but also runs all freight operations in Brooklyn, Queens, Nassau and Suffolk Counties of New York. They also run freight into Oak Point yard in the Bronx. I am not sure if they go any further north or east but that is something for future reasearch.

Research isn't hard except what I keep running into is that I often find more information than I can digest at one time and once I have digested it, it usually brings up more questions than I originally needed answers to! So I find that often find out more than I really wanted to know. But that's OK because it means that I found what I need to know to successfully recreate operations that most people don't realize are happening in crowded places like Brooklyn or Queens. You see ,ost railroad operations in these two boroughs of the City of New York are hidden from public view and thus not easily accessible if at all.

So never give up on doing your reasearch because you'll eventually find most of what you need. For the rest, well, you can always use "Modeler's License" to fill in the empty spaces. Most people who'll look at you layout will never know whether what you depict is real or not anyway.

Irv

prototype research for locomotives

I have another idea for information regarding prototype research for locomotives. Try looking at  some railroad employee timetables for the railroad you are trying to model. Some of these publications actually give decriptions of the locomotives used and their assigned road numbers. Some railroads, like the Norfolk Southern, have a booklet entitled "Condensed List of Locomotives". In that publication they list everything you need to know about their locomotives. The only drawback to timetables is that they don't show paint schemes.

I hope this helps you or at least gives you more information.

Steve

espee.railfan.net

One of the things that is amazing about the site is that Richard Percy (the sites founder) lives in Perth, Western Austalia - over 9,000 miles from the S.P.  It shows how the internet makes the world so much smaller.

Tim