The Southern Railway's S-Line runs westward from Salisbury, NC, through Asheville to Bull's Gap, TN. Most of my early rail-fanning in North Carolina involved the section of this line between Hickory and Asheville. An article in the January 1981 Model Railroader about the Southern's Asheville Special made me think about including that on the layout. The Asheville Special stopped running in 1975. The locomotives that I was most familiar with on this line, EMD GP38-2s and SD40-2s, were purchased starting in 1972, so I decided on 1974 for the time period of the layout.
