Florida Central and Peninsular Railroad
The Florida Central and Peninsular Railroad was a railroad company in the US state of Florida . Its past consists of a number of acquisitions and renaming that date back to 1832. Thus it was the temporary end of the development of much of the Florida railroad in the 19th century. Since 1881 and 1882, the company was owned by the British railroad magnate Edward James Reed and in 1903 it was part of the Seaboard Air Line Railroad .
Parallel developments in railroad construction in Florida took place through the Plant System by Henry Bradley Plant and through Henry Morrison Flagler's Florida East Coast Railway .
history
The first railway lines and development into FC&W
The Tallahassee Railroad was founded as the Leon Railway in 1832 and renamed two years later. In 1837 she opened a railway line that ran from Tallahassee to St. Marks on the Gulf of Mexico . It was only the second railway line ever in Florida. The very first was a nine-mile line in what would become Gulf County , opened by the Lake Wimico and St. Joseph Canal and Railroad Company on September 5, 1836, and closed again in 1841. The Tallahassee Railroad, however, survived for the time being and was incorporated into the Pensacola and Georgia Railroad (P&G) in 1855 .
At the same time, the Florida, Atlantic and Gulf Central Railroad (FA&G) was founded on January 24, 1851 . She began building railroads in Jacksonville in 1855 and eventually reached Lake City in 1860 . P&G was founded in 1853 and began construction in Tallahassee in 1856 . Capitola was reached first in the following year and Lake City to the east in 1861. In 1863 it was expanded westwards to Quincy . The last expansion by the P&G took place a few weeks before the end of the Civil War with a branch from Live Oak in the direction of Du Pont to the state border with Georgia , where the line met the Atlantic and Gulf Railroad (A&G). After the war, A&G took over the entire route from Du Pont to Live Oak.
The FA&G was renamed Florida Central Railroad (FCRR) in 1868 and merged two years later with the P&G to form Jacksonville, Pensacola and Mobile Railroad (JP&M). The JP&M was originally supposed to push ahead with the further expansion of the route to Alabama . It acquired the FCRR's route usage rights, but only made it to Chattahoochee in the 1870s . The section on to Pensacola was finally opened in 1883 by the Pensacola and Atlantic Railroad .
In 1882, Edward James Reed acquired JP&M and renamed it Florida Central and Western Railroad (FC&W).
The Florida Railroad to the FT&P
A second line of business was created on January 8, 1853 with the establishment of the Florida Railroad , which was to build a railway line from Fernandina (north of Jacksonville ) across the state to Cedar Key on the Gulf Coast. The chairman of the society was the politician David Levy Yulee . The opening of the first section from Fernandina to Starke took place in 1858, in the following year Gainesville and finally Cedar Key in 1861. In 1872 the company became part of the Atlantic, Gulf and West India Transit Company , which in turn became part of the Florida Transit Company after being bought by Reed in 1881 . The company was converted into the Florida Transit and Peninsular Railroad (FT&P) in 1883 .
Two subsidiaries of the former Florida Railroad, the Peninsular Railroad and the Tropical Florida Railroad , were founded in 1881. The former opened in the same year a branch from the Florida Railroad main line at Waldo to Ocala . The latter extended this branch first to Wildwood (1882), then to Plant City (1886) and finally to Tampa (1890). In Plant City there was a transition to the South Florida Railroad , which was part of the Plant System .
Merger in 1885 and takeover by SAL in 1903
In 1885, Edward Reed merged the FC&W together with the FT&P and the Leesburg and Indian River Railroad (L&IR) to form the Florida Railway and Navigation Company (FR&NC), which at that time owned the largest rail network in the entire state. In 1886 the FR&NC was converted into the Florida Central and Peninsular Railroad Company.
This was followed by two further restructuring of the company. On May 12, 1889, it was converted into the Florida Central and Peninsular Railway and finally, on January 16, 1893, as the last step, into the Florida Central and Peninsular Railroad .
On August 15, 1903, the Florida Central and Peninsular Railroad was incorporated into the Seaboard Air Line Railroad (SAL).
literature
- Gregg Turner: A Short History of Florida Railroads. Arcadia Publishing , Mount Pleasant 2014, ISBN 978-1-4396-4254-2 .