Hi,
I think your idea for a fictional town is good. The only thing is, if the older son in going into the service it will be the Army Air Force, for that`s what it was in the 1940`s.
If you need help thinking up a story plot Email me . I have a small railroad video production company.

Leonard.

When some student filmakers were looking for such a project, someone steered them to me. I was doing research on WW2 RR operating units in France and Germany, and they wanted a screenplay. I wrote a treatment on an idea about two boomers who worked for the ET&WNC in the '30s, getting drafted and joining a RR unit in WW2. The hated each other's guts, but hated Herman the German even more.
It wasn't quite the "win one for the Gipper" claptrap you'd expect, as one eventually allows the other to get waxed by an attacking airplane.
They were quite enthused about the project, until they realized that if they wanted trains in it, there's NOTHING in the US they could use (and afford) that would be right. My script was mostly stateside stuff, and the war was mostly dealt with trackside and in engine houses and such. More fighting than trains. Here in the Pac NW, it could easily pass for Germany, and I have access to lots of WW2 vehicles (including my own 1944 Willys MB Jeep), and equipment and re-enactors to flesh out the scenes.
It never went anywhere of course. I'll probably never finish it now.

But with a recent trend to WW2 movies, imagine a "Band of Brothers" style series on a RR battalion in WW2!

Or if you want to go back into history a bit further and do a "docudrama" about a real life -band of bothers- try the Army's 21st Engineers, Light Railway of WWI. They operated the 60 cm (1 foot and 5/8 inches gauge) "trench" railroad doing resupply from the rail heads to the front during WWI under incredible conditions. The unit became so close that they held annual reunions up to something like 1972 when age finally slowed them down. I learned about them through Richard Dunn's "Narrow Gauge to No Man's Land" which is probably the most available treatment of the little known 60 cm combat railroad both the Allies and the Germans used. The U.S. in the short time it was in the war built 124 miles (more track than the Maine 2 footer, Sandy River and Rangley Lakes had at it greatest extent) and operated something like 1200 miles of 60 cm track. The British and French operated even more. This was no small potato operation either, in a ten month period, the U.S. light railways alone moved over 860,000 tons of material and racked up over 8,000,000 ton miles.

Unfortunately very little of the equipment has survived to the present day for this sort of day. But still a heroic effort by combat railroaders.

Ed