>>1249748Funny, we pulled the exact same shit in France. The EMU trailers were ready long before the power cars and started their operational life sandwiched between BB8500 locs (3 trailers set on the RER C, at least one 10 trailer set operating out of Paris Gare-de-Lyon on what would become the southern half of the RER D and I've heard about an 8 trailers set being used on the western suburban lines out of Paris Montparnasse. As time went on SNCF started to mix and match trailers all over the place, culminating with the RER D special "Bidule" (loosely translatable to "thingmajig") consisting of 2 second gen Z20500 power cars, 2 first gen trailers (salvaged from 5 cars set turned 4 cars for the RER C) and a coach from loc hauled push pull sets rewired to fit the EMU (those being salvaged from St-Lazare area VB2N sets that lost a coach when the ageing small boxy locs they had been mated to since forever were replaced by absurdly oversized Prima freight locs nigger rigged to work suburban trains).
>>1249763>also all those trains were surprisingly boring.The railway autist in me is deeply conflicted over the Z2N family. They've all proved decent suburban workhorses (Northern France regional services even purchased a handful of them, and seasonal reinforcements saw them running services between Lyon and the Alps and along the Mediterranean coast not so long ago). They'll be what generations will remember as the "suburban train". It's kinda amazing that they kept producing essentially the same design until 2004, especially as it's a very flawed design for the intensive suburban services they've been running (basically, not enough doors). Another fun fact, at some point refurbishment programs were overlapping among the series (the RER C roster ended up sporting 4 different paintjobs around 2014-2016).
Oh and looking for early trailer only operation practices I even found a shortened ZR2N used for trials on the RER A. They've just been everywhere.
