How to check on rolling stock, wheels/trucks, couplers, age, code 80 or 55?

Model Railroader General Discussion (Model Railroader)
1

Checking on websites that sell rolling stock is there someplace online where you can check;

  1. When they were made/how old?
  2. What type Truck/Wheels they came with?
  3. What type couplers they came with?
    A lot of you old hands at N scale can probably just look and tell I of course cannot.
    It would be really cool to have 1 or 2 websites where you could check these things as the sellers may not know they just want to sell what they bought.
    What it is, is that I know want to buy some rolling stock and I don’t really have a clue by looking to figure out these questions?
    With the cost of New Trucks & couplers about how much would you want to pay for stock per car? best guess the sites have lots of them
    In other words Help???
2

Not really sure of your question. Are you asking what type of wheels, couplers etc. and what were the build dates on specific prototype pieces of rolling stock or does your questions pertain to models? If you want to know what type of equipment your prototype ran you can usually find out by researching that specific railroad. If your talking about the model then you have to check with who ever built the model.

3

Unfortunately, you won’t find all of this in one place. A good start, though, are “Spookshow’s” N scale pages on locomotives and rolling stock.
http://www.visi.com/~spookshow/trainstuff.html

And while MR is the best general forum (IMHO), for N Scale specifics you’ll probably do better on a forum with more N scale conversations. I’ll send you a Private Message with a couple of suggestions.

In terms of buying previously-owned equipment on auction sites or elsewhere, you’d be well-advised to spend some time to learn a bit about manufacturers and models before buying a lot. N scale equipment from the last 10-15 years is vastly improved and there’s quite a bit of older stuff floating around that’s basically junk compared to what is available today.

Best of luck.

4

Keep in mind this is the “Prototype information” section of the MR forums, so questions specifically about models should probably be in the “General Discussion” section to get the best results.

You could check the Atlas forums also, their forums are divided into O, HO and N so I’m sure many N-gaugers post there regularly.

p.s. it’s always a good idea on model questions to specify which scale you’re asking about. [:)]