Research help needed - how to figure out a railcar's owners?

[ednadolski]

Does anyone have any sources, tips, guidance, or other suggestions about ways to figure out who the subsequent owner(s) of a prototype railcar are/were, after the original owners sold the car off?    For example, railcarphotos.com has fields like 'builder', 'lineage', and 'notes' fields in their search page which can be helpful for this.

I have a model of a UNPX/Procor 4750 hopper that I would like to weather up to follow some proto pics of the car after it was patched for a subsequent owner (if any), tho my search efforts so far have come up short.  Seems it may be easier to do this sort of thing for locos, since there is in general more history available for this sort of thing.

Thanks in advance!

Ed

[John]

ORER -- official railway equipment register .. there is also the freightcars list .. it's probably on io groups now .. those guys track this stuff

[Missaberoad]

Alot of digging... like John said the Modern Freight Car List is probably your best start, there are alot of hard-core freight car historians that hang out there.

ORERS have alot of good information, but ownership history is not something they list. You can track cars but need to have multiple issues and match the old series with the new series (dimensions/weight/number of cars in series etc...) a large investment in time and money that may not bear fruit...

What series of procor cars is your model? The Alcan cars wound up in the USLX 5200 series.
the 121xxx series cars in grey with blue/black lettering I believe remained Procor in ammonium nitrate service.

[cv_acr]

http://canadianfreightcargallery.ca/cgi-bin/search.pl?marks=UNPX&builder=Pullman-Standard&display=short

[Missaberoad]

http://canadianfreightcargallery.ca/cgi-bin/search.pl?marks=UNPX&builder=Pullman-Standard&display=short

Winner winner chicken dinner!
http://canadianfreightcargallery.ca/cgi-bin/image.pl?i=wfrx837606&o=wfrx

Chris, how do you get the car histories on your website? Your's is one of  the most extensive sources for that.

[CBQ Fan]

Railway museums always seem to have this information on their collections. They must have applicable resources.

[cv_acr]

Winner winner chicken dinner!
http://canadianfreightcargallery.ca/cgi-bin/image.pl?i=wfrx837606&o=wfrx

Chris, how do you get the car histories on your website? Your's is one of  the most extensive sources for that.

Part of it is just looking at enough freight cars to recognize the patterns of patch-outs so I can sometime recognize an original paint scheme, and then cross-checking with ORER or other data for the original source, or even my own photo database for photos of the originals.

Other stuff comes from various roster sources (especially www.nakina.net should be your first stop for Canadian Railway roster listings) etc.

Like in the case of that WFRX car, all I've got listed is "ex-UNPX" which is obvious from the PROCOR logo. But I deliberately designed the "Reporting Marks" search on my search function check against current, history, and "renumbered to" fields.

And it's always a lot easier to go backwards (by identifying old logos under patch-outs) then forwards, but searching through the histories for the older mark helps draw that out and searching against the history/lineage for the original mark is how you can search for where they went.