I just received my copy of DreamTrains2 and have a question for someone. I there one online listing or book listing for all passenger cars made in the US or one for Pullman, one for Budd, etc.
No, absolutely not.
There are not even complete listings for each railroad.
There is some information online, but you will not get even partial listings for major railroads without paying the fees and joining their historical society. Even if you paid the fees and joined every single historical society, you still could not assemble all the information into one source. That, and much information is simply missing. Note: few historical societies have made roster information available online for free, but there are exceptions. Some UP stuff is available for free.
Their are multi-volume books covering passenger cars of just one major railroad from one builder alone. There are entire book series devoted to just Pullman- or Budd-built cars of the major railroads. Also, there were plenty of builders beyond Budd, Pullman, and ACF, like St. Louis Car Company and others.
Likely the best, most concise information you can find in one book is to buy the (usually very affordable because many were printed) book Night Trains. The author “froze” each night train (carrying sleeping cars) on a theoretical weeknight during summer of 1952 or 1953, to show based upon the railroad schedules where each sleeping car in the entire U.S. was at midnight (assuming trains were on schedule). It only tells you what kind of sleeping car–ie accommodations or arrangement–it does not tell you the builder of the car in question. It is helpful to those modeling specific roads who can then take that information and figure out the car distribution based upon the known rosters.
Night Trains likely provides the best snapshot of “the way they were” if you are looking for an overall picture–but is not accurate for numbers of coaches, diners, etc., as it focuses on the sleeping car “lines” a
The best books that I have found are Car Names Numbers and Consists by Robert J. Wayner, and From Zephyr to Amtrak by David Randall. I will not say that either one is complete, but they do list cars by railroad and then by builders.
If you go to www.worldcat.org and do an advanced search, entering in the keyword box the words passenger cars names, you’ll turn up 57 hits. By playing around with words, you can get more or fewer. Although many of these books or other items will be out of print, there are always libraries, interlibrary loan, and of course BookFinder.com and so on.