However, not all of them were named after counties. There were four in total, and there were two variants of them. The first variants were originally Delaware, Lackawanna & Western commuter coaches that are so commonplace at heritage sites throughout the Northeastern corridor (yet despite this there are no HO scale models of them available). Great Smoky Mountains Railway acquired four of them from the Blue Mountain and Reading Railroad (which owns several coaches of this type and still do!). This information I would have never found out had I not acquired a copy of Gleeful Production's Great Smoky Mountains Railway VHS.
As I've mentioned in my first post about GSMR coaches, these ex-DL&W coaches were named after counties that the GSMR ran through and were originally numbered in the 300 series but had to be changed to the 500 series because the GSMR had already acquired coaches in the 300 series prior, sharing too many similar numbers. BM&R's 322 became GSMR's 522 Jackson County, BM&R 323 became GSMR 523 Cherokee County, and BM&R 324 became GSMR 524 Haywood County. The railway also acquired a No. 321 from BM&R and renumbered it to 521. This coach does have a name, but what amount of footage I have of it is impossible to use as a reference:
A couple of weeks ago I saw a listing on eBay for a collection of vintage GSMR photo negatives taken in 1992, one of them depicts No. 521. These negatives were removed from eBay quite early on by the seller but I'm trying to reach out to them to see if I can acquire them or not.
Now, the chairman of the railway at the time, Malcolm MacNeil, had a dislike towards the clerestory coaches, due to these having a higher center of gravity. This is why you don't see many of them today at the GSMR as he sold them off. I can only assume that he thought if he could get a different model of clerestory coaches, it might make a different. This is where the second variants come in. These coaches were built for Canadian National in the 1920s and of a more ubiquitous model than the DL&W commuter coaches. Four CN coaches were acquired by GSMR from, as far as I'm aware, the Potomac Eagle Scenic Railroad. These coaches had their numbers traded with the DL&W coaches as they're practically the same. The names were changed slightly. No. 522 and No. 523 still retained Jackson County and Cherokee County respectively, but No. 524's name was changed to Swain County.
For a long time I had no idea what the name of No. 521 was, and with good reason. The only available source of info is far from crystal clear:
One day I happened to pick up a brochure I got in 2003 for the Raft & Rail trip, in which the GSMR ran rafting trips in conjunction with the Wildwater Ltd. rafting company. "Wildwater Ltd." It looked like a very possible match (and the only good match available) with the lettering in the above screenshot. It makes sense as well, since the GSMR hosts a lot of rafting packages on their train schedules. So I can officially declare that the second variant Coach No. 521 was named Wildwater Ltd. What I can't determine is that there is a subtitle underneath the Wildwater Ltd. to which I can find no suitable match as of now, so that in itself is a bit of a mystery. What I can tell from the screenshot is that the subtitle seems to comprise of a C_______ of C________.
No. 521 Wildwater Ltd. no longer resides at GSMR, and neither does No. 524 Swain County, but you can still see No. 522 Jackson County and No. 523 Cherokee County at the Great Smoky Mountains Railroad, albeit their names shortened to Jackson and Cherokee.
