I am building a door layout that is intended for the transition period of SP. SP- why? Because I loved the look and colours of the Daylight. A smaller portion of my railway is kindof the opposite- that bleak, horrible period of the concentration camps. I have a bunch of SP steam and diesel locomotives, and two German locomotives.
I will be expanding the door layout.
What I WANT to do is to run other beautiful equipment as well. PRR had some beautiful locomotives. So did Santa Fe.
So far I've added a couple of Southern locomotives (figured the average guest (ie young relative) wouldn't notice the difference between Southern and SP).
I know how the internodal sharing of the freight cars gave us odd ducks in strange parts of the country. Presumably the same thing happened with some of the passenger cars (not wanting to wake up the passengers and have them switch trains on a transcontinental run). Were locomotives borrowed/leased from one railroad to another ?
I'm wondering if anyone has any idea of what I should do. Obviously I'm giving up the prototypical railway by expanding like this. I'm wondering if I should widen the time range to maybe the early 70's to get more types of diesel in there? Should I add new railway companies in the expanded area (the SP trains will still have to run around it, and vice versa, it won't be a huge layout)
I'm sure others have addressed this decision with various philosophies. Should I just stick with a time period and run whatever I want? Should I seek adjacent railways to the SP and have SP borrow their locomotives? Should I aim for similar colour schemes? Should I just not worry about it and build away? I do like the transition time period for modelling though. I just find it attractive.
Thoughts?
