The nearest to a database that has identifying information is the Kolls catalogs that are issued each year, but these are known to not be complete, despite their inclusion of all sorts of models, and going right back to the earliest OO/H0 models. It comes only in German, and as Herr Koll is getting on in years he now only produces the slimmed down edition without photographs. He used to also produce what was called the "Complete Catalog" which has photos of many (but not all) of the items to show identifying features, and a "Special Items Catalog" which listed many of the special editions that were produced, also containing many photographs and will be referred to from the Complete Catalog. The catalogs only come as printed books, with descriptions in German.

Often auction sites will use Kolls numbering to identify a particular version of the item being sold, so you will see numbers like xxxx.yyy where the x is the original catalog number and y is the kolls additional number to identify that particular version.

The Marklin database is also not complete, it only covers items that are in the catalogs issued by Marklin, but there are a number of Marklin special production items for retailer chains that don't appear in the main catalogues that also do not appear in their database. Known retailer chains commissioning items from Marklin are Eurotrain (Idee & Spiel), Vedes (MC, Modellbahn Center) and more recently Wilde13+ (a group of individual shops, originally 13, but I believe now up to 15 - which is why the plus sign). There may well be other chains and affiliations I am not aware of that commission items.

Then on top of the retailer chains and associations who commission models, Marklin also offer to produce items for companies to use as promotional items. These also don't appear in the Marklin database.

I have found this site: https://www.modelrailroa...us/Model-Train-Directory to be an excellent source for Marklin items though the list is not Marklin exclusive.

You can try googling hfkern and maerklin loks or maerklin wagen. His database contained a lot of information but has not been updated in almost two decades.
For older models, you can get a copy of one of the Koll books. if it is not the current edition, it will not include that year's additions.

For newer models (post 2005), you can pretty easily find information on the internet.

Regards

Mike C

A Koll's catalog has most of the info that you need but it is in German text only.

Rick

There was a discussion on available catalogs from 1930 to 1999 on this site in 2017:

https://www.marklin-user...-1930-1999-download-link

Several years ago, I was able to get pdfs of every catalog from 1930 to 2014, but it was on CD which I copied to my hard drive and a thumb drive. Don't know if the seller is still in business, but someone else may still be able to provide it. May be worth a search on ebay.