what type of carriages

[Anonymous]

im new and want to know if a loco's lets say sante fe can pull any type of carriage like union pacific and that cause i have a assosrted armada of carriafes

bob

[dehusman]

Yes.

In N America the engines mostly stay on the owning road and the cars mostly go all over the continent. If you are on the ATSF (Santa Fe) you will see mostly ATSF engines, but all sorts of cars.

Dave H.

[Jetrock]

Indeed--transfer of cars (known as carriages in England--there's a rather interesting article in John Armstrong's CREATIVE LAYOUT DESIGN about the differences in terminology between American and English railroads) is very common in the United States. Typically the most common "foreign" cars seen are ones from the region and neighboring railroads, while those from far-off lines (like, say, a New England line's car in California) are the least common but far from unknown.

Even the lending of motive power was not unknown--especially if the railroad was owned by another railroad. A local line, the Central California Traction, was owned jointly by Santa Fe, Southern Pacific and Western Pacific, and it wasn't unusual to see engines from any of those three lines running on CCT tracks--and there were CCT diesels that spent more time on the parent company's lines than on their own home tracks. Even railroads with no owner-subsidiary relationship might rent each other motive power during peak traffic periods, such as the harvest season of various crops.

[BR60103]

It was also common for single cars to be transferred from one railroad to another to offer through service from one city to another, so that you would see all sorts of railroads going into New York. Pullman cars were owned by Pullman and usually painted green, but some were painted to match the name trains of the railroads. These could stray onto other railroads at times.
We are talking passenger trains? Freight cars went everywhere.

[Jetrock]

In the passenger realm, it wasn't unknown for a name train to be carried over adjoining routes--the "California Zephyr" traveled via three railroads: from Chicago to Denver the Chicago Burlington & Quincy headed up the train, the Denver & Rio Grande Western carried it from Denver to Salt Lake City, and the Western Pacific carried it the rest of the way to Oakland.

I don't think it was general practice for passenger coaches to be swapped around between railroads on an ad-hoc basis, though...assuming that all the coaches match, it wouldn't matter too much if the engine didn't, as you can say "Oh, that's my 'Silver Overland Limited' name train!" with some suitably plausible story about an inter-railroad passenger line...

[Anonymous]

As I understand it, private cars (like the Kato Business car) would have travelled over several RRs, often hauled in other road's passenger trains.

[Jetrock]

Private cars are kind of an exception, because they were pretty rare when compared to, well, just about any other type of rolling stock. It's a bit of an incongruity, though, that of all the cars run on the railroads, private cars are the most likely to be preserved until the current day, whereas more mundane cars were relegated to the scrap heap. One combination I see once in a while is older heavyweight cars on the tail end of Amtrak passenger service, pretty much railfan outings. If you've got a nice older car on your modern passenger layout, that could be a way to justify its occasional presence on the layout...