Saluda is a place people dream of modeling but I don't think it's actually been
done many times.
I’m hardly an expert on the area (I’ve only railfanned it a couple of times), but you could run all kinds of stuff. Just think of all the SRR/NS steam specials you could run up and down the grade!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NUPIynJq7tgI’m 99% sure that the Freedom Train never went up Saluda, but that’d be really cool as well. Frankly, if I didn’t model the ET&WNC at all, I’d probably model a southern area mainline in the 70s so I could build and run a model of that train in whatever scale it is…