Trivia / Tweetsie Railroad

• Follow the Leader: The surprise success of Tweetsie Railroad in the early 1960's led to a slew of smaller Western theme parks all throughout Appalachia in The '60s and The '70s, most of them went under but a few found success.
  • Dollywood in Pigeon Forge, Tennessee is the most successful and the only one of Tweetsie's imitators that is still in operation today. Ironically, the park was originally founded by Tweetsie's founder Grover Robbins in 1961 as Rebel Railroad, a sister theme park which was basically Tweetsie Railroad in the American Civil War before being bought out by the Missouri-based Silver Dollar City theme park in 1976 and then later becoming Dollywood after Dolly Parton invested and became majority shareholder.
  • Ghost Town In The Sky was Tweetsie's earliest main competitor and was located in Maggie Valley, North Carolina. It was noteworthy for its funicular mountain railroad system and for the owners letting it be used as a Western film set, usually at far cheaper rates than the more established movie ranches in California and Arizona. The park deteriorated all throughout the Turn of the Millennium until closing down for good in 2009. There were several attempts to reopen Ghost Town throughout The New '10s but nothing came of it. As of 2020, the park is up for sale yet again.
  • Rim Rock Railroad in Norton, Virginia was one of the more unusual examples. It was founded in the late 1960's and closed down by the end of the 1970's. It had the same cowboy theme as Tweetsie, but the lack of tourist infrastructure in Norton or the neighboring area of Wise County helped doom it to obscurity. The locomotive was bought by a private collector who had it on display outside a local restaurant in Dickenson County, Virginia until 1996, when it was sold to a historical society. The restored and repainted locomotive is on display at Natural Tunnel State Park in Lee County, Virginia.
• Real Song Theme Tune: The Ghost Train has Ozzy Osbourne's "Crazy Train" as its main theme.
  • In The '90s, it was Blackfoot's "Train Train"
• The Other Darrin: The Marshal, his Posse, and the various members of the Tweetsie Tribe, as well as townsfolk. Fred Kirby played The Marshal from The '60s until the early 1980's, and since then, the characters of Tweetsie are played by local actors and students from nearby Appalachian State University, resulting in a high turnover rate. Averted with the actual railroad staff, since authentic steam locomotives need a licensed engineer (who is trained to operate steam locomotives), an actual conductor, and workers to operate the engine workship. Seeing as those are hard to find, most of the actual railroad staff have been around for years, sometimes even decades.