At the George L Carter Railroad Museum on the campus of ETSU, the Mountain Empire Model Railroaders are constructing a model of the East Tennessee & Western North Carolina RR in HO scale. The large layout showcases the entire line from Johnson City, TN to Cranberry, NC as it appeared in the railroad's heyday. Although compressed to only eight scale miles, all of the major landmarks of the "Tweetsie" are present and built to exact 1:87 scale. Almost all of the structures are or will be scratch built, as will be several items of rolling stock. Over the last few months the Blackstone C-19s that have dominated the layout for several years have been slowly replaced by small fleet of Tweetsie Ten-Wheelers. These Train & Trooper brass kit have proven to be very troublesome, not taking kindly to the tight curves of the layout and unable to pull very much without additional weights., but after years of modification and testing are finally entering service. 11 has been running smoothly for almost a year, followed by another 11 and 14, and 12 has just entered the final phase of troubleshooting.
In this video we follow 4-6-0 #11 as it leads a freight from Johnson City towards Boone, then follow #12 on a mixed train downhill from Cranberry. Finally we catch a brief glimpse of #14 heading toward Elizabethton with a string of standard-gauge cars.