There are times when I get just as much enjoyment with the historical portion as I do with the trains themselves.
History is my first love overall, the trains are just part of that for me. My layout which will start construction will be as tight a representation as I can get for Tennessee life in the WW2 era. My parents were little kids in that timeframe but they remember all the details very well, I'm milking them for all their memories of the place and time.
Along with the original topic is that the RR I will be modeling (the ET&WNC, or 'Tweetsie' as it was known by the locals) simply didn't have segregation as such. Yeah, they did have one car that could have been used for Jim Crow purposes for how it was laid out, blacks simply didn't ride the RR all that much. Ironically they had at least one black guy who worked on the locomotives and for sure at least fired them from time to time. But simply put, not a lot of black folks lived along the line to speak of. You just don't find period photos of blacks anywhere near the trains, except for the black employees the RR had (which probably weren't many). Draw whatever conclusions you will for the reasons behind it, but it's a simply fact. Had segregation apparently been an issue on that RR, I'd be sure to address it, just as I am modeling scale MPs to keep the scale servicemen away from the scale locals, something which happened in the South a lot in WW2, regardless of color.
