Would it work that the pantograph and trolley pole can be toggled, just like some third party and recent DTG electrics?
This is a great question, but it makes an "apples and oranges" comparison.
The vR, ALP-46 and similar locos have two opposed, single-arm (Faiveley) pantographs. The "up" panto is usually determined by the direction of travel so as to optimize the contact performance. At high speeds, it's more efficient to push the carbon bar into the contact wire, than to drag it. On a model of this kind of locomotive, the panto pairs can easily be animated up and down to suit the travel direction, and RW provides core support for this.
The SN locos, which are anything but modern, used separate pantos and trolley poles for completely different reasons, as explained in the User Manual. It's just as easy to animate a trolley pole up and down as it is a panto, but trolley poles have an additional degree of freedom. They have to rotate about a vertical axis so the contact wheel always follows the overhead wire. That's difficult, if not impossible, to accomplish in RW.
So that's the main reason the motors on the SN don't use the trolley poles. Another reason is that, at least in the case of the steeple cabs, they never used the trolley poles anyway, at least not at the South End. The interurbans did use trolley poles north of Shafter Yard, but the contact wires were specially supported with closely spaced side-draw wires to form curves that closely followed the tracks. In other words, they weren't supported by the familiar catenary-profile messenger wires. I would never have built this route if I couldn't have used the RW catenary tool for the 40 or so miles of track north of Shafter. It was bad enough I had to make all those special wire-support grids in Oakland -- but well worth it, don't you think? So use the pantographs that Ricky gave you and learn to love them!
