One thing I forgot was links to literature about the prototype. I do not mean "anything rail related" although with proper organisation such a collection cannot be bad. I am more concerned about the fringe of the scope of the docu.
Suppose you implement the processes inside a steam engine at a high level of detail. Then you certainly will not want to include 500 pages describing what is going on in the boiler and how the firebed, the quality (type, granularity) of coal and the speed pattern of the duty of the engine are connected. But people need to know about it to really understand what they do when they set all the parameters. Therefore, we need good ("certified") pointers to additional sources of information.
This can be:
- Printed books. They are often the best source in terms of completeness, but often expensive. Some are available at libraries. Sometimes a cheap but complete edition exists. Information about it will directly improve model quality and thus customer satisfaction.
- Web resources. As mentioned in other threads there are many good pages on rail-related topics. However, many of them do not go too deep into detail, but some do. If each link would be accompanied by a one-paragraph description of the content and if the links were regulary checked to sort out dead ones, it would be a number one resource at no cost, nicely complementing the printed books.
- At least for early railways, Google books are an invaluable source of first hand information. Searching for such books is a bit time consuming, so again a compilation of pointers with good description would improve the knowledge of the community.
These pointers certainly cannot replace the white paper collection of "how I implemented X in KRS". But given the vast diversity of rail history these white papers can only describe specific examples and people will always need to refer to additional original information. (Plus, no-one wants to repeat dozens of pages of operation rules or physical dimensions of an engine which can be found somewhere else.)
