Shedmaster

It is implicit in rule No 1 that rule No 1 is applied in any way you see fit. 

I've found that there are no rules, on model railways, unless there are visitors!

Rule 1 grants you the inaleable right to excercise complete freedom on your layout, but with great freedom comes great responsibility.  Paradoxically, and to the dismay of the hippie generation, a basic framework of rules and methodology increases the amount of freedom that you can actually use (as opposed to the amount of freedom you can actually have), so that in practice you have more freedom not less.  Laws that prevent your being robbed, attacked, or murdered increase your freedom to carry on your life as you wish.  If there were no clefs, notation, pulse, and time signatures, music would be noise, because music is structured by definition, and noise is unstructured by definition. 

So, approaching running your trains and, indeed, buying them with these examples in mind, Rule 1 is your individual interpretation of the dichotomy that must exist between our desire for realism, our knowledge of what that is, our modelling ability, and the fact that what we are really dealing with is little electric toy mice.  You make your own satanic deal with it, and nobody else is owed an explanation of what that deal is; in fact it may be a moveable feast that you have never quantitatively examined yourself.  In my case it is inconsistent as well; I put proper lamps on my trains but am happy to run crude and basic Airfix A30 auto-trailers or cut'n'shut Triang clerestories, and only recently gave up on a Triang Hornby 2721, about as fundamentally inaccurate a model as has been produced after the Rovex Black Princess and shorty banana coaches.  After putting up with all sorts of anomalies on it for years and doing loads to work it up and improved the running, I finally decided I couldn't live with the overlong bunker.  My Rule 1 says the same as yours, but they are not the same, and this is as it should be.