Congrats on your choice of ConRail. I model Santa Fe, but I think deciding wha you want to model is a great start. For anyone in a similar quandry, one thing to consider is a freelanced shortline. I'll give you a real shortline as an example. The Arkansas & Missouri Railroad is a 130 mile long shortline running between Ft Smith & St Joseph. They are a 100% Alco fleet because the owners discovered early on that they could buy 3 used Alco locomotives for the price of 1 used Gp9. The result is that at various times in their history, particularly in the early 1980's a consist on the A & M would include paint schemes from virtually every railroad that ever ran an Alco Century 430. If you model a freelanced shortline, you can run any model in any paint scheme you like. Another example is a local shortline here in Southern California. The Pacific Harbor Line used to be named the Harbor Belt Line. They service industries in the Los Angeles and Long Beach harbors. When it was the Harbor Belt Line all of their locomotives were painted a light blue with Harbor Belt Line on the side. I think maybe it was big sky blue, but it was so faded out and weathered when I've seen them that it is hard to tell. I don't know if they got a new owner, or if the owner just decided to do something different, but the owner is a railfan who likes classic railroad liveries. The name was change to Pacific Harbor Line. They have an ex-Santa Fe Sd24 in fresh black & silver zebra stripe. They have an ex-S.P. gp9 in a fresh black widow scheme. They have a bunch of other paint schemes that I think are East Coast short line schemes, but I don't recognise them. There is an ex-S.P. sd40-2t that was left in it's bloody nose scheme. All of these locomotives have Pacific Harbor Line in large block letters on the side of the long hood, and PHL under the numbers on the side of the cab. The point being that short line railroading is a great way to have a bunch of different color paint schemes on your railroad.
