I know a lot of people in the hobby who are operators tend to gravitate towards one railroad or maybe a few different railroads that are near each other. It seems from many of the layouts people have that most people like to model their layout around a geographical area and tend to run trains related to that area. I know there are some outliers and not everyone in the hobby collects this way (and I use collect as a term for the collection of trains they have to operate on their layout rather than in the collector versus operator way).
I myself am focusing my layout on the Boston & Maine, New Haven, New York Central, Southern, Norfolk & Western, and Louisville & Nashville. I know that is quite a few and they span the Eastern US. I grew up in New England, went to college in Virginia, and now live in Tennessee. So I like the idea of modeling part of my layout on the Southeast (Virginia, Tennessee, Georgia, the Carolinas) and part on the Northeast. Plus I like many of the color schemes and designs used by these railroads.
My question, though, is if any of you ever run random locomotives on your layout? Say for instance you model the Pennsylvania RR (a popular one it seems), but maybe you run a Union Pacific Big Boy on occasion. This is really just for conversation as I am curious as to what others do. I myself have thought a lot about this and decided that I will sometimes run other railroads just because it is fun and you can get some unique locomotives that other railroads don’t have. For instance, I really want to get a Southern Pacific Cab Forward at some point just because I think it is a great looking unique locomotive. The Southern Pacific doesn’t fit with my RR theme, but the Cab Forward is unique to that RR. So anyways just curious as to whether others do this sometimes and if so what unique locomotives do you have that don’t match the main railroads you model?