Maintenance of Way

We took the VIA to Toronto last weekend, and as we pulled out of Coburg I caught sight of this MOW equipment in the yard:

My wife managed to snap a pic of the head end as we went by, and you can't see that further back on the string is a big back-hoe thing, and a control cab at the far end. But a little Googling finds the Herzog corporate site, and a page on the Multi-Purpose Machine, including a video of it in operation (and if you linger on the page long enough, an MPM drives by in the top banner). The cars look like modified well cars, and the "back-hoe" can drive up and down the length of the train.

It just so happens that, a few months back, I built this little cast-metal kit from Railway Express Miniatures (paint job courtesy my dear wife):


Sort of an earlier iteration of the same idea. Very cool to see a prototype.