Hi gang. Call me slow if you will (I deserve it), but I just found out recently that you can run freight cars from any other road in a consist… And there I was all that time trying to run cars together that I felt were connected to the road I was modeling. I had seen roads such as Santa Fe mixed in with say for example Nickel Plate Road train but I thought it was rare. As it turns out the rail roads all worked together and you might see any road mixed into a train. Live and learn…
Mark, that is called interchange… a car and it’s load travels from POO (point of origin) to POD (Point of delivery) regardless of what roads trackage it’s on… main driver of standard gauge…
BTW, I just made up those terms![(-D]
A good book for prototypical ops on our little railroads is Track Planning for Realistic Operation… Hope it helps…
Or too young to learn something old [:D]