I, too, have noted the same problem! My very personal solution (not universally practical) is a bunch of reference books (Japanese language) collected during the 1960’s, plus an ongoing subscription to Tetsudo Mokei Shumi (Japanese language, and $$$!)
There is one bright spot in an otherwise bleak landscape:
My present roster includes EF58167 (brown body), plus an un-numbered, unassembled EF18 (box body 2-Co+Co-2, mechanically identical to the streamlined EF58.) Both are 1960-era TMS brass kits, powered by vertical shaft open frame motors. Eventually I’ll assemble the one and modernize both, but right now layout construction on my 2-car garage filler is eating up most of my time.
Finding sites that list Japanese locos and rollingstock can be a bit of a chore, as you’ve discovered. I’m assuming that you’re looking for JNR equipment, which I must admit is not my primary interest, but here’s a few sites you may find useful. My main interest is private railway EMUs, of which there are a bewildering number and variety of!
http://nekosuki.org/landscape/
There’s an awful lot of stuff on this site, but it includes rollingstock from all Japanese operators. Plus scenery, stations, industries and railway infrastructure.
jeffrey,
FYI, I wouldn’t trust any video source for factual information that I couldn’t see on the video. Most videos are filmed by railfans (not local ones at that) and not employees of either the RR or the loco manufacturer. There are several cases of mistaken ID’s of locos, locations, and trains in the RR vids that I have. One of my favorites is a mispronounced city in a Pentrex video on U-Boat Survivors. They featured the Providence & Worcester RR…except they kept calling it the “Providence & War-cess-ter RR.” (It’s called “Woos-ter”…or, as the natives call it, “Wis-tah”). Sigh. [:)]
BTW, if you want to argue about the 2450 gal., talk to EMD 50 years ago, not me. It’s straight from the source. [;)]
Anyone wanting to get a good look at a B-C locomotive, the Maine Eastern Railroad has a pair of FL-9s that they use on their passenger runs between Brunswick and Rockland. There is a good picture on their home page:
marknewton - for some reason it never occured to me that sites about Japanese engines & rolling stock just might be in…Japanese [xx(] - Thanks.
So far (with the help of BabelFish) some of those sites are very interesting and informative. I was warned that the most modern Japanese rail freight is tanker trains, cement, steel & scrap, and containers, and looks like the ‘roster shots’ bear that out.
BTW, speaking of Japanese private railway EMUs triggered a very old memory of computer game time wasting in the early 1990s - namely A-Train.
Idea was to build stations and transport passengers and building materials, buy land in the city, build resorts and so on. One thing that bugged me was the game presented a whole list of EMU/DMUs to chose and upgrade from, but offered no explanation of what the pros & cons were of each class - you ended up choosing blindly…
Also I remember that eventually if your city got big enough the game AI would build (piece by piece) a Shinkansen line throught the city, and if you owned land next to where the AI built the station you gained a fortune (and a line of railroad conductors would appear on screen to bow to you and to each other).
Finally, the reason I can’t play it now is because I think they programmed the game speed by the computer system clock rate - when I played it on my 386 it worked great, but when I tried to run it on a Pentium I (yes kids, these once were cutting edge), the game went into quadrple time, running 4 or 5 times as fast - so fast you couldn’t select trains or run things (and no way to slow things down either - Oops. I shudder to think what a Duo Core would do to that poor game nowadays)
jeffrey,
Um, not for nothing, but the New Haven disappeared as an operating entity at 12:01AM, January 1st, 1969 into the Penn Central. The History Channel & the Discovery Channel were but distant dreams at that time.
There is only one NH produced film, “A Great Railroad at Work”. This film was made in b&w in 1941 and released in 1942 as a war time film.
There were several advertisements made in the 1950’s by the NH for view on TV, but as for films featuring the FL9? Sorry, but I don’t think they were made by the NH.
There are, of course, many NH videos for sale. Some are even produced by the New Haven Railroad Historical & Technical Assocation. But even they aren’t perfect.
G Paine,
The Maine Eastern is a good ride (I’ve done it twice), and the FL9’s look good up there. But FYI, they aren’t B-C’s, they are B-A1A’s.