I’m not sure if I have the nerve to do it,but I had the idea of weathering and numbering both sides of some of my engines and rolling stock differently.I have a chest high, around the room,2ft. wide.shelf layout and at no time can you see both sides of the train.I realize that you will always see train xxx running north to south and train yyy running south to north [after they are turned] Other than not being prototypical,any other thoughts?
A clever idea, you might get away with it as long as train turning is carefully controlled. I’m not sure you want to do that on engines though. If you use a card system, you could just have double sided cards.
Years ago there was an article in Model Railroader about doing that. The layout had an out and back configuration. The locos and cabooses were not only numbered differently on each side, they were each lettered the two different railroads which were modeled.
The trains of the ABC railroad left the yard on the ABC main and came back as an XYZ train on the XYZ main and outbound XYZ trains came back a inbound ABC trains.