I love putting my engines in "disguise" to see how they would look running special excursions on foreign trackage. I spent a day transforming Santa Fe no. 5000 into "Chesapeake & Ohio no. 3000", operating excursions for CSX across the eastern United States. The first two shots are of the locomotive preparing to depart with a 5-hour excursion with 16 cars in tow.
Here is a list of things done to ATSF 5000 to disguise her as a C&O 2-10-4-type locomotive:
-Added magnets to tender and locomotive with "C&O" markings. This includes the cab and tender lettering itself, as well as covering the numerals on 5000's forward sand dome
-Replace 5000's headlight with a visored-type light with number boards
-Replace the brass number plate with one numbered "3000" with the numerals painted gold
-Add a "shroud" connecting the two sand domes to mimic the massive single sand dome of the Van Swearingen engines
-Remove the ATSF number boards that were forward of the sand domes
-Remove the stack extension
-Replace her ATSF 5-chime whistle with a whistle from a C&O 4-8-4 locomotive
-Added white trim to the walkways and cab
-Sanded the smokebox sides and painted them dark gray to match the locomotive face
"C&O 3000" ran excursions on the Arizona Central for two weekends in her disguise until being returned to her typical ATSF appearance for the remainder of the season in Arizona.
In "real life" it's assumed that none of these changes would require any heavy work to undertake, just removal or replacement of some of the pieces on the locomotive. I even chose magnets as they wouldn't require the engine to be re-lettered before and after these series of excursions. I have several other locomotive disguises I may share at some point, including ATSF 5000 as a fictional Cotton Belt 2-10-4, and CP 5361 in several different disguises as Louisville & Nashville no. 1536 and Atchison, Topeka & Santa Fe no. 3165