I've been toying with the idea electric traction but if I'm going to go to the effort of putting up catenary I don't want it to be just cosmetic.
In general, the model catenary duplicates one of the rails. This is fine until the loco is turned.
Another option is to follow the prototype - make both rails common and always take power from the overhead. This would require rewiring rollingstock, which isn't a big issue, but would prevent the electric stock from running on a normal 2-rail layout or running steam or diesel under the wires.
Is there any electronic trickery that would allow a vehicle to run off 2 rails or off overhead, whichever way it's facing? The idea would not be independent control of two trains off both power sources at the same time, but rather some sort of on board system that could make a circuit through the overhead and /either/ rail depending on which way it's facing.
This would be purely DC. I don't even want to think about how to do this with DCC!
Cheers David