I went on a search quest last night to find out the following, to little or no avail: Original build date for an 11,000 gallon single domed tank car including weight, empty and full and whatever else I can pick up so I do up my undecorateds in the LLL. I went deep into Google (10 pages in) with various key words and phrases, etc. No luck. Are there any known sites with this sort of information? I can not even find out who manufactured the car. I would not be asking here if I hadn't already tried and failed.
I think you've run into a basic problem of the Information Age: A lot of important information never made the transition to digitization. You're going to have to look for this information in books -- which is one of the reasons, I think, that a lot of model railroaders spend a significant part of their budgets on books. What's galling is that libraries only rarely have books that seemed like "railfan stuff" to librarians. The University of Virginia library, for example, makes a big deal about being one of the best research libraries in the world, but it has only 3 books on the Rio Grande. (I am not making this up.) There is an interesting analogy here. Recently, NPR carried a program pointing out that most of the vinyl LP repertoire never made it into the CD catalogs. The problem is, due to this, we are losing our musical heritage. Of course, I wouldn't argue that CD publishers were obligated to translate all this stuff to CDs. But libraries hadn't purchased the vinyl, so there's a real possibility that a lot of this musical heritage will be lost forever. The transition to digital information hasn't been 100% positive.
