The great loco motive chase.

• Author: McMillan, Alex Frew
• Position: Tweetsie Railroad Inc.

Things can get a little crazy in a mountain feud over control of the state's oldest theme park.

U.S. 321 rolls north down from the sleepy mountain resort of Blowing Rock into the valley of the Yadkin. Just beyond Mystery Hill a large meadow opens. At its end, Tweetsie Railroad nestles on a hill against the river. The spring sunshine trickles through the trees over the stage-set Western main street. "Population 310 1/2," the welcome sign says. But it's off-season, and Tweetsie is a ghost town.

Near the entrance there's a one-story building with a strip of doors, each numbered. The sign over Booth 4 dangles on one end, half its chain broken. There is no noise. Without the flags and costumes, without a swarm of screaming kids, Tweetsie looks old, tattered and tired. It's draped in melancholy, like a beach town in winter.

During the season, more than 200,000 guests descend on the theme park, the state's oldest. They ride the ferris wheel, a spindly contraption like those set up in mall parking lots. They take a small chairlift to the top of the hill, where a mock mining town has panning for gold and mountain clogging. There are go-karts and cotton candy and fudge and video games.

Most important, there's Tweetsie itself. The old No. 12 engine steams its way 3 miles around the hill on a narrow-gauge railway. Most visitors spend about six hours at the park, and they ride Tweetsie two times. Twice they run a gantlet of bandits and Indians, many played by students from nearby Appalachian State. The kids help fend them off with cap guns they've screeched their parents into buying at the gift shop.

It's hokey. And compared with Paramount's Carowinds, two and a half hours away in Charlotte, it's tiny, its attractions lame. Tweetsie has few pretenses, selling itself as wholesome family fun. Kids come with parents who themselves came to Tweetsie as kids. It rests on laurels laid almost as long ago as the tracks, which went down in 1957.

The train is named for the shrill whistle of the steam engine that ran from Johnson City, Tenn., through the Blue Ridge Mountains to Cranberry, in Avery County, from 1881 until World War II. Cowboy star Gene Autry optioned it and considered moving it from Virginia to California but balked at the cost. So train enthusiast Grover Robbins Jr. snapped it up for $17,000 and moved it to where it is now. North Carolina's own television cowpoke Fred Kirby inspired the western motif when his Charlotte station dressed the park up for his birthday in 1959. As Tweetsie's marshal the singing cowboy and his horse Calico kept the bad guys at bay for 30 years. Kirby died at his Indian Trail home two years ago at 85.

Tweetsie has a new marshal, of course, but the park has needed more than a gunslinger of late. Its posse of lawyers has beaten back one hostile-takeover attempt and, for the time being, staved off another. They've quashed squabbles with dissident members of the Robbins family, which still runs the park. They've fought off complaints of mismanagement. But now a land war looms. And it threatens the make-believe railroad more than the James-Younger gang or Crazy Horse ever did a real one.

Last year, developers John Englert and Brad Schrum formed Young Realty Investments LLC to buy Tweetsie Railroad Inc. They had already bought one each of the 21,000 Tweetsie shares outstanding. They then paid $60,000 for 1.3 acres where 100 or so yards of the track run and wrote letters to all shareholders, insisting the Robbins family sell out.

Backed by brothers John and Robert Collett, Charlotte developers and part-owners of the Harper's restaurant chain, Young Realty pledge $10 million to fix up the park. Schrum won't say how much he would offer to buy Tweetsie, but audits have pegged the stock at slightly more than $150 a share, putting its market value at about $3.3 million. The company's $4 million in sales - about the same as the Charlotte Knights minor-league baseball team - earned $380,000 last year.

A local family, the Coffeys, sold the tract to Young Realty only after Tweetsie turned it down. The park had a sweet deal, paying only $450 last year under the year-to-year lease. The day after Young Realty bought the land, it went to court to get a judgment to allow it to not renew the lease - which Schrum wanted as a bargaining chip to force the sale. He claims Tweetsie's lawyers told him, if he'd drop his suit and sign an agreement not to disclose anything he learned, Tweetsie would discuss a deal. Young Realty withdrew the suit in February.

Then Tweetsie cut off all contact, Schrum says. "They didn't know us," he complains. Tweetsie went to court with its version of the lease, which it contends Tweetsie can renew indefinitely as long as it stays current on the annual payment. Schrum claims computer-generated dates on some of the documents show Tweetsie was working on its case when he thought it was negotiating in good faith...