It is always fun to come across examples of the "real" railroads doing something that we modelers have been familiar with all along.
How many of us have used a Kadee/X2F or Rapido/Microtrains adapter car on our layouts during those coupler transition times?
Here's an example I came across while researching something recently:
This Penn-central gon was even set up with an anti-climber to mate up with New York subway cars being transported from St. Louis to NYC. Penn-Central took the idea right out of the model railroader's playbook!
Here is a link to the Columbus {Ohio} Railroads web site which is the source for this photo.
http://www.columbusrailroads.com/new/?menu=Home
There's some very interesting and well presented articles worth looking over here.
Regards, Ed
A more 'temporary' set up, but one I witnessed first hand. This is a knuckle coupler adapter that latches over a commuter rail style automatic coupler. This particular instance was a TEX Rail Stadler built FLIRT DMU that was on the Salt Lake Garfield and Western railroad for display during Stadler's factory ground breaking last year. This allowed the unit to be shoved to the display site via some idler freight cars being pushed via a locomotive.