When I was planning a layout themed for the narrow gauge ET&WNC, I knew i couldn't do justice to the real locations, so I went with a fictional branch line, a railroad that ran near the real line and was bought out by the "Tweetsie" before WW2.
Early in the process, I wrote a detailed history of this fictional branch line and I adhered strongly to it in all aspects of planning and execution. If something wasn't explainable under this concept, out it went.
Everything has a history. Take this water tower for example:
The Stoney Creek Southern, the company which owned this line before the Tweetsie bought it out, had a few aging 4-4-0s. When the ET&WNC brought in their ten-wheelers, out came the torches.
Here we are, in the late summer of 1943.
When the men of the 796th Railway Operating Battalion (a fictional unit, I wrote the history of that, too), they found number 3 sitting rusting away, where it'd last been used as a backup. The soldier/railroaders hoped to get it running again but found the flues and cylinders in terrible shape, along with a collapsed dry pipe. Once word came that three former WW1 'trench' engines would be regauged at the shops in Johnson City, out came the torches.
There's a low gondola filled with the rods, a few drivers and other parts. There are some wheels and axles still sitting in the weeds from #s 2 and 3, waiting to be lifted onto a car once a crane shows ups. In this timeframe, there are very few metal items rusting away, as everything has gone off to wartime scrap drives. There are even rumors that the civil war cannon barrel at the war memorial nearby will be melted down for shell casings.
The tender for #3 was in halfway decent shape and the soldiers needed a water tank. They badly wanted the water car hauled on a platform, but the ET&WNC still had use for it. So, some metal patches were riveted in place along with a metal plate to cover the top.
They had no paint and little time, so they used the remains of a water column and quickly erected a platform from materials left over from a bridge they had just completed near Carter, TN. It worked just fine for Army # 5069.
The only other remains of the SCS's 4-4-0s is the former tender from #2, which was turned into a water tank in 1936, after the locomotive was involved in a nasty grade-crossing accident near Speedwell. It was one of the last pieces of equipment that was lettered for the SCS
