Eastern Florida Railroading
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
SCL, ACL, SAL, CSX, and FEC sounds more like a spilled bowl of alphabet soup than the past and present railroads of Eastern Florida. Look past the acronyms and you'll see a colorful history and strong presence along the eastern seaboard of the Sunshine State. Let's take a look at what makes this region fascinating.
[edit] Not an acronym
The biggest survivor of the spilled alphabet soup is CSX but its name is not an acronym like its predecessors. The Florida part of CSX evolved from the Seaboard Airline (SAL), Atlantic Coast Line (ACL), and Seaboard Coast Line (SCL), the SCL being formed by the mergerof the SAL and ACL in 1967. As an amalgam of the best of its predecessors, today's CSX has a mainline that cuts diagonally through central Florida ping-ponging off of the major metropoleis of Tampa, St. Petersburg, and Miami.
CSX is considered to be the powerhouse in Florida railroading with most of the state's rail mileage. Products hauling across these routes range from phosphates to fast intermodal freight. Most of the road's mainline traffic in Florida is the latter heading to and from Miami's port and inland southern cities like Atlanta.
[edit] Flagler's child
Next up, the Florida East Coast (FEC). Originally conceived by entrepreneur Henry Flagler as "The Railroad to Cuba," this one roughly parallels the Atlantic Ocean coastline. At one time passengers could take FEC [passenger]] all the way to Key West and from there take a short steamship ride to Cuba. Since most of the route was over water on long viaducts, and trestles, hurricanes proved to be the railroad's Achilles heel—so the road eventually pulled back to Miami as its southern terminus.
Today the FEC is still an independent carrier in a sea of mega-railroads. The line made industry headlines in the 1960s as the first major railroad to use two-person crews (instead of traditional four-person crews) and eliminate cabooses. Such drastic operational changes didn't come easy, especially in labor negotiations. Nevertheless, the FEC's need to stay lean and mean won out and the railroad served as a model for today's style of railroading. To learn more, see Seth Bramson's "Speedway to Sunshine," recently republished and considered the definitive book on the railroad.
[edit] Today's passenger trains
Two government agencies take care of passengers in eastern Florida today — Amtrak and Tri-Rail. Amtrak offers two major services to Florida, the Auto Train and Silver Service. Started as a private venture in the 1970s after the creation of Amtrak, the Auto-Train made news as the first U.S. passenger train to take on passengers and their personal automobiles. The trains are the longest that Amtrak runs, usually with three locomotivesand over 20 cars including the special automobile carriers.
Click to ViewTri-Rail began operations in 1989 to serve commuters in Broward, Miami-Dade, and Palm Beach counties. Today Tri-Rail operates seven days a week along a 71-mile corridor with 18 stations. For the railfan Tri-Rail features brightly colored equipment with some unusual passenger locomotives. The ten-unit Tri-Rail locomotive roster includes F40PHL-2s and F40PH-2Cs from Morrison-Knudsen and its successor Boise Locomotive Company (now Motive Power Industries, plus two former Amtrak F40PHRs remanufactured by Boise Locomotive. To learn a little more about Tri-Rail take a look at this article at Trains.com.
