I was looking through Ed King's "The A Norfolk & Western's Mercedes of Steam - Revised and Expanded Edition" and noticed on Page 144 (page 105 also has more detail) there is a picture of Class A 1213 in 1957 with a sheathed smokebox and a front engine with multiple bearing crossheads and a rear engine with alligator crossheads. According to the caption, in 1957 Class A 1205 was in a wreck at the same time 1213 was in the shop for a major overhaul. 1213 gave up her front engine to get 1205 back on the road expeditiously, and then 1213 took 1205's front engine. Both 1205 and 1213 remained with mismatched front engines till the end. It would be more of a challenge to model 1213 in 1957 given the sheathed smokebox (like a Y6b), but it seems like making a 1205 with a multiple bearing crosshead rear engine and a mismatched alligator crosshead front engine would be a possibility given the tooling Lionel will be producing. Steve Nelson @MrMuffin'sTrains, any chance you'd be up for trying to get enough support to get Lionel to do a custom run of Class A 1205 from April 1957 onward ? That way we can have both multiple bearing and alligator crossheads in one model 
I'm not sure if it would be okay per forum rules to post a picture from Ed King's book.
