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!
A good book for prototypical ops on our little railroads is Track Planning for Realistic Operation... Hope it helps...
Steve
If everything seems under control, you're not going fast enough!
Or too young to learn something old
Rio Grande. The Action Road - Focus 1977-1983