Just wondering, what are the oddest combinations of rolling stock either seen together or run together on your layout, and how do you ‘get away with it’?
I’ll start off with mine - on my layout, a Shay could be seen next to a Southern Pacific ‘daylight’ GS-4, at the head of the daylight express. The daylight express has had to divert over the ATSF trackage due to an accident on the SP, and the Shay belongs to the New Mexico Logging Co., whose union agreement requires that NMLC locos deliver the log cars to the ATSF for forwarding.
Try this one. A 4-4-0 wood burner lashed up behind a pair of SD40-2’s. Wouldn’t that raise some eyebrows. The wood burner would be dropped off at a railfan meet as the SD40-2’s headed to their next assignment. I watched a rivet counter turn five shades of white on that one.[(-D]
Okay, not that ‘odd’, perhaps. But my Rio Grande “California Extension” runs midway between the SP Donner Pass route and WP’s Feather River Route. Gee, sometimes Donner Pass gets either snowed in by an early October blizzard, or WP gets bottle-necked because of a rock-slide.
Rio Grande offers them a nice relatively snow-free and rock-slide free passage via the Yuba River over Yuba Summit.
HOWEVER–Rio Grande’s signalling system does not co-incide with either SP or WP, so in order to activate the semaphores, a Rio Grande loco MUST be coupled on ahead of either SP or WP power in order to get the trains over the Rio Grande version of “The Hill.” Ergo: One of Rio Grande’s chunky little 2-8-0 or 2-8-2 locos runs coupled up to the E-6’s of the “City of San Francisco” or the F-3’s of WP’s “California Zephyr.”
On dual gage (std & 3 ft), a narrow gage loco pulling a string of standard gage freight cars or visa versa. This was prototype somewhere out west; they used an idler flat with offset couplers to match narrow gage and standard gage equipment. They also had trains that mixed narrow gage and standard gage rolling stock.
Back in the mid-'60s while traveling far away from the bonds of civilization–Central Iowa–I once encountered an eastbound C&NW movement consisting of a couple of covered wagons running elephant style trailing about two dozen mixed lightweight and heavyweight passenger cars, close to a dozen wood sheathed boxes, a caboose, with a heavyweight sleeper carrying the markers. There were a lot of broken windows in the passenger cars; some windows had been boarded up; and I believe one of the passenger cars was of wood construction althought I may well have been a steel car with simulated wood scribed into the metal. This train was sitting on a siding for a meet with a westbound which I had been pacing for about 50 miles.
Some of you old-timers will remember the "It ain’t prototypic feature carried by one of the hobby mags; I have never actually modeled this what I consider an extremely unusual train but were I to elect to do so I could do it with the assurance that “It’s prototypic”.
My favorite was a 1890’s 4-4-0 pulling an electric E-44 past an 8 horse hitch plowing a field. However since that actually happened on the prototype (the photo was in Trains) I guess it really doesn’t apply to this thread.
Didn’t MRR have a column at one time about this?–I seem to remember summat. In fact I have a photograph taken out of a MRR about some covered hoppers with multicoloured hatches—