Eastern Railroad Discussion > Some images from my Florida trip last week.......

Spent a week in Florida last week, and although it was primarily a winter-vacation with my wife, I managed to photograph a bit of rail-related subjects which I thought I'd share here. On Tuesday we flew into Orlando and drove down to the Florida Keys via Lake Okeechobee for a few days. While passing through the town of Okeechobee at the north end of the lake, we came across this CSX local (I believe O715) tied up on a siding on the east side of the Rt 15/441 crossing consisting of CSX GP38-2 2789 (ex Conrail 8220) and GP39-2 4307 (ex D&H 7418 / Reading 3418). Across the roadway is the Amtrak station seen here which serves Silver Star trains 91/92.

While travelling Rt 1. in the Keys, we saw many bridge remnants of the Florida East Coast Railway Oversea Extension to Key West adjacent to Rt 1 which remain in use for for walking, biking and fishing, though this section pictured below between Spanish Harbor Key and Bahia Honda Key obviously hasn't been used in a while as it has several sections missing.

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Back in Orlando on Saturday we had a bit of time in the morning where I attempted to get the southbound Silver Star (91) somewhere south of CSX's Taft yard. Unfortunately the 15 minute estimated delay departing the Orlando station (10:30 - 10:45) shown on Amtrak's mobile website turned into a 2 hour delay which I couldn't hang around for. But before leaving for our planned event, I managed to get this Taft-based local with CSX 2727(ex Conrail 8072) switching in an industrial/business park just a couple miles south of Taft. Later in the afternoon I came across the northbound Silver Meteor (Amtrak 98) waiting to pull out of a siding just south of Taft right after southbound 97 had just passed.

When we head back to Florida next year I definitely have to build time into our trip to do more exploring of the interesting rail operations in Central and South Florida,

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Nice heritage unit catch on Amtrak 98!

Jon

Thank you for sharing some of that Florida weather with us.
John

If you can next year go the other way around Okeechobee and check out the cane fields and the USSC/South Central Florida operations. Clewiston is home base for most of that. I've always loved that drive down the Keys and always stop and photograph the former FEC bridges. Bahia Honda Park is a nice place to stop and do lunch and check out that truss bridge close up. Key West is nice in that it's about as far away from the rat race (aka Disney) as you can get in Florida. I'll be down Fla way in a few weeks, thanks for the preview!

RAD