What? You didn't know there was a steam locomotive knowledge base? Well, technically speaking, there probably is not. However, practically speaking, there are many knowledgeable people out there and the first thing you should be doing is a general web search.

Sometimes you want to target your searches to sites relating to steam locomotives. Fortunately, a number of Bulletin Board Systems are available where steam locomotive enthusiasts ask and answer questions. If you have a question regarding anything that is railroad related, these Bulletin Board Systems are a wonderful resource to use.

I have had some luck finding knowledgeable people on www.trainorders.com. The use of Google's "site search" makes searching sites like that easy. Here is a search function to search www.trainorders.com: