This is a new subject for me and searches tend to turn up lamentations about pricing and inflation, but I'm wondering how pre-order works and has worked more broadly speaking from the modelers' perspective.

Yesterday, I briefly paid visit to an antique store I hadn’t dropped by in quite some time. The prices there can be anywhere from brilliant to horrendous. Generally, if you want to get something for a reasonable price, look for stuff without a price tag on it. Anyhow, while exploring, I came across a little pile of HO trains sitting on a shelf- and since there wasn’t much I’d seen so far, I figured I’d just as well look at them.

I'm looking for a (preferably pictorial) diagram of the split K-brake system as installed on a USRA 55-ton twin-bay hopper car. I'm assembling Tichy's kit #4027 for this car and would like to add parts of the system that Tichy doesn't show, e.g. the floating lever, cylinder lever rod, lever hangers, lever-to-truck rods, complete train (air) line. For this extra detail Tichy's instructions say "...check your references for guidance...", but they don't give any examples of such references.

This was a recent posting over on the Repower/Regear groups.io   
I thought some folks here find it interesting.