Is there a list/compilation somewhere of all N scale manufacturers' stock number lists? I have several cars that are not in boxes or just in a plain box that I am trying to inventory. It seems to me I have seen one somewhere, but a quick search can't seem to come up with anything.
Trovestar is not yet complete (I note some items not yet posted) but it's the closest we have to complete and it's the best opportunity we have to get there. There has been a LOT of work put into this site to get it this far. Many thanks to all involved.
If you have N scale items that are not already in the database, you can join and add them yourself. You can also use the use the collection option to create your own inventory.
Yes, absolutely! Unfortunately, the cars I was looking for on Trovestar are ones that I don't have either... but keep in mind that there are almost 92,000 entries in the database at this writing. No other effort has even come close.
I've been trying to put all my locos and rolling stock into an Excel spreadsheet so I know exactly what I own to avoid duplicate purchases. So all I do is enter the reporting marks & road number into a Google search and usually within the 1st page of results, you'll see a link to the Trovestar page. This has been a godsend in trying to find the manufacturer of a certain railcar.
When I first started doing model trains, I was tinkering with FoxPro databases to keep track of range results and other things related to work. As I started doing trains as a hobby, I created a system for them as well. And ever since then, whenever I got a locomotive or a freight or passenger car, in they went into the database.
Years ago, I used the FoxPro application, too, and it worked well and I had everything I had, related to my trains, in there. I backed the files up along the way, on 3" floppies, and then that PC crashed. The files are still on those floppies, somewhere, but I gave up on he inventory thing. Working with files to be sure you never lose them is SUCH a joy. Doug
Most any competent computer shop can quickly transfer those for you to another medium or your choice. Some might even do it for free. There used to be, might still be available aftermarket USB connected drives for those disks.
Hey Doug, Boxcab is right, there are aftermarket USB connectable disk drives. Recently got one off of Amazon for under $20.
Well I guess I am fortunate that my other addiction is High Definition Audio and Video and the "family" also decided on going the Apple way with iTunes as well. ( I was out voted ) So I ended up getting a SAN device that is running RAID 5 so if one drive fails, I do not lose anything. Perhaps that is because in my work I have to save test data and design data for long periods of time, I guess it seemed prudent to do the same thing with with my personal data demons. Today, there are many large USB drives, perhaps the place you go to will transfer the data free when you purchase the USB device. The good thing about these devices is that the cost for several gigabytes is very affordable. My whole collection in FoxPro consumes 13MB, so it may be that a thumb drive is all you need.
I remember 10" floppies, and 10 megabyte removable hard drives in hat-box-sized cartridges. Back when a single computer was one or more racks of equipment, and not that long after "computer" was an occupation/job title.
Correct, 8" floppies... We still used mag tapes (on reels, not in cartridges) long after the 8" floppies and removable circular-cartridge drives were gone. Reliability/longevity of those mag tapes was very high compared to most alternatives. I remember putting out a call for all design archives that were still on mag tape, to transfer them to new media, before we retired the last mag tape drive. We engineers, myself included, were always squirreling away our design/test data, just in case. Never mind that most of the data was held in company and customer archives anyway, having all of it in your file cabinet felt safer and was more convenient. Even if you had to go to another building that still had a tape drive on which to retrieve it.
