Re: Modelling ET&WNC after 1950 question.

I've thought long and hard on this.
The ET&WNC was just barely hanging on when it got a second wind during WW2. Frankly, had it not been for the war, it might have been done by about 1943 or 44.
The 1940 hurricane/floods doomed a large portion of the line, leading to the desired abandonment of all of the track from Cranberry to Boone. The ICC needed little argument to agree to the removal of the old Linville River route and the line to Boone.
So, what about an expansion within that timeframe? No way.
Now, had something important like large radioactive deposits been found in those hills before the end of WW2, it might have held on as the D&RGW had.
Even though my own On30 ET&WNC layout has an Army presence, you wouldn't see that unless the Army decided to either have a training unit in place during WW2 for narrow gauge operations or to support defense related shipments during/after the war. Either way, it's a stretch.
Maybe even if the highways didn't make the Tweetsie redundant, long enough to dieselize, I'd really doubt that. Don't forget the standard gauge steam didn't leave Johnson City until the latter half of the 60s. But what if it had survived and the later highways, lacking the right of way to put roads on the abandoned ET&WNC left behind in the 50s, went somewhere else? Would that have meant no highway further than Hampton heading into North Carolina and the railroad remaining for a theoretical upsurge in traffic?
Maybe. Doubtful, but maybe.
A ET&WNC still running, as the White Pass or Rio Grande segments do today, that's a very ponderable thing.
Oh, to pace a ET&WNC train in the 21st century, over the massive bridge at Valley Forge and watch it go under or over the highway at Hampton and see people sightseeing from the train at Elk Park or Road Mountain, with passenger coaches and perhaps even ten wheelers 9, 11 or 12 which never got scrapped or sold off as the line was never abandoned...
Oh, you'd have to have what we know today as Tweetsie RR in Blowing Rock with just former White Pass & Yukon power (probably at least one other engine that is in real life at Dollywood today) and the park called something else than "Tweetsie."

-Lee

Flickr photo set of my On30 layout



Edited 5 time(s). Last edit at 11/09/2020 01:05PM by et&wnc.