How to "grow" a cylinder along a spline or path

Hello,

I'm a fairly inexperienced use of VE and I am in process of making a wiring installation document that shows step by step procedures. What I would like to do is animate a wire being hooked up in one terminal and making it "grow" or lengthen and show it feeding into another terminal. I typically use 3DS MAX at work and can easily do this with that program but can't figure out if VE is capable of this.

After giving this some more thought, animating the transparency along the length of the object would work as well.

Thoughts?

Thanks for your help,

Dean F