Looking at it from a city & environmental planning perspective ... the original V&T was dead anyway, whether or not SP might have bought it, assuming the development patterns of the last 100 years stayed the same. There's pretty much nothing left of the original alignment in Reno and CC - all houses and other stuff. You'd have a hard (not impossible, but hard) time even locating much of the old line except maybe around the lake where things aren't so built up. So if there is any real potential for freight on the modern V&T or some modest expansion of it, the only practical outlet would have to be through Dayton to the Hawthorne line.