Part 1
Railroads by new equipment in lots and give them a set of numbers as the running numbers, this can be as low as one or up to 20,000 or more. Finding out what the set of numbers should be can be hard sometimes.
Locomotive numbers are the hardest ones to find as some numbers were used on more than one locomotive and the railroad shops can make a locomotive look like deferent one. The C. B. & Q. had a 2-4-2 that went into the shop and came out a 4-4-2. I also know of a F7B that was made into a F7A with a full cab but it was 6" shorter.
Passenger cars mostly have names but a lot also have numbers or both.
Everything else has numbers that are not hard to find.
Finding locomotive and passenger car numbers by railroad is best if you can find a roster for the railroad. Passenger car names can be a big mess as a lot of cars had more than one name over time.
This gets us to freight cars witch can be found in the Official Railway Equipment Register this was a book but is now on line. ORER was first published in 1885 and came out weekly. This was used by the railroad to make up trains. What it has is every car used in the U.S., Canada, and Mexico with car numbers, marked capacity, length, dimensions and cubical capacity.
The current one is around $250 but the old printed ones can be found as used books. For use in modeling there was a NMRA reproduction of Vol. LXVIII No.3 January 1953 that can be found. I got one from Amazon and there were 3 or 4 available and runs abot $45. The book looks like the yellow pages has 826 pages.
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