[Jonatan]

Just a thought I had while toying around with a newly built railroad crane model in MSTS, I know it has been done in RW but would OR be able to do working cranes?

I've no idea how such a scheme would be carried out, but say it would include a special "crane" type of vehicle in the .eng or .wag files, or perhaps even a .crn file. And this type of vehicle would have very basic workings. Animations would be triggered by certain keys like swinging left or right, raising and lowering the boom, and attaching some kind of rope. I would imagine this rope could work as four splines snapping from a predetermined point of the model to each bottom corner on the bounding box of the nearest availible engine or car, then the lifting of the model would be done with the boom of the crane and when everything is positioned to within a set tollerance level of the track, the lifted model would snap onto the track again, undoing the ropes.
There would be certain obstacles to overcome that might possibly require alot of extra coding, like having smoke and lights follow a part of a model instead of staying in one place, and I don't know how this would be done by any means without breaking existing systems.

I'm not sure if anyone else would think this is an idea worthy of spending time on and that I should just get a Lionel TMCC crane instead, but I could see very big multiplayer possibilities for it where players can co-op on bringing a recovery train and rerailing a set of derailed vehicles.