Plans are made by the manufacture, railroads, and rail fans/modelers.
All plans can have mistakes in them and they can also be out of date due to model changes and then the railroad shops can make them look completely different. This makes having good photos a must to make a good model.
Manufactures plans - the originals
There are three basic types, locomotive, passenger car, and freight car. All are on very large paper, newspaper size and up, witch makes scanning them hard. What is not on them is all the parts from the parts suppliers. Common practice was to not draw the wheels, bogeys, air brakes, grab irons, lettering and so on. They are also hard to find as most of the old ones were not saved. In 1879 the first Car Builders Cyclopedia was published fallowed by the locomotive ones some years later witch have lots of the original plans and the plans for the missing parts. Some are on CD, some are on Google Books, and you can buy them on Ebay and Amazon.
Railroad plans - class books
Some large railroads made up classification books. A lot of them are on the Internet. They are small per-printed forms with a lot of data on them and a side and end view with dimensions but most look had drawn. Some have copy's of the originals.
Rail fan / modelers - plans found in model magazines and books
Model railroading started in the 1930s witch started the model magazines and a need for plans. Most of the plans came from the Cyclopedias or class books. The early ones are not that good as the models did not have a lot of detail but they did add in the lettering. By the S the plans got a lot better and are the easiest to use and find. They also had plans made by modelers that were made by measuring the real thing or from photos.
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