Railroads’ rich past rolls on in Winter Garden
On a recent Friday afternoon, downtown Winter Garden bustled with families strolling along Plant Street or biking on the West Orange Trail. Folks lined up to buy coffee, pastries and pizza from homegrown businesses. The scene looked like a snowless version of Bedford Falls in the movie “It’s a Wonderful Life” — small-town America at its best. Folks like me, who ventured to 101 S. Boyd St., a block south of the main-street action, found a huge slice of America’s past on display at the Central Florida Railroad Museum.
Like its home — a 1913 depot built by the tiny Tavares & Gulf Railroad — the museum makes more mighty contributions to history than its size and origins would indicate. Operated by the Central Florida Railway Historical Society under an agreement with the Winter Garden Heritage Foundation and the city, the compact building opens doors to the history of railroading in Central Florida and beyond.
Railroad riches
Winter Garden is blessed with two historic train depots, by the way. The more visible one, the former Atlantic Coast Line station on Plant Street, sits on the spot where farmers built the city’s first depot in 1893 so they could ship citrus and produce on the Orange Belt Railway. The building is now home to the Winter Garden Heritage Museum.
A couple of blocks away, the Tavares & Gulf line added another wooden depot in 1899 and replaced it in 1913 with the railroad museum’s home, built of Florida sand brick.
The railroad’s founder, Alexander St. Clair-Abrams, who also founded the city of Tavares, had dreams that his city might become Florida’s capital and that his railroad would reach St. Petersburg — hence the “Gulf ” in the line’s name. Instead, the T&G
reached no farther than Winter Garden, Ocoee and Clermont, for a total of 38 miles of track that led to a legendary reputation.
Although known for excellent customer service, the T&G was plagued by frequent derailments. According to local lore, a T&G train once took a week to go from Tavares to Ocoee and back. Such episodes earned memorable nicknames, including the Turtle and Gopher, the Try and Go, and the popular favorite, the Tug and Grunt.
But the T&G was no joke; it and other railroads had an enormous impact on the growth of Winter Garden, Orange County and the
citrus industry that was once king here.
Before the railroads arrived, folks could grow oranges and other citrus, but the fruit would rot before it reached Northern markets. Central Florida farmers and citrus growers had to haul crops by wagon to steamboats that traveled the St. Johns for passage north. Railroads opened up the interior of the state to development in a way that had previously been unimaginable.
Miles of topics
The Central Florida Railroad Museum covers many miles of
track beyond the venerable T&G. Photographs and artifacts reveal the stories of railroads in Florida and far beyond. An extensive collection of dining-car tableware features more than 30 patterns from a dozen railroads, for example. One poster on the walls reminded me of a fabled train, Seaboard Air Lines’ the Orange Blossom Special, which operated during Florida’s busy winter tourist season from the mid-1920s until 1953.
Researching his book “Orange Blossom Boys,” about the song inspired by the train, Winter Park author Randy Noles talked with a retired railroad worker who remembered the train in the 1940s. As it passed through Florida, passengers would see the oranges hanging on the trees “so close to the track that you could almost touch them,” the man said. “That really excited all those tourists from up North.”
The version of the Orange Blossom Special pictured on postcards debuted in 1938, when it went on tour throughout the state to show off the powerful diesel engines that were replacing steam locomotives — an immense technological change. Steam locomotives required
servicing after only a few hours of operation, but a diesel could complete a 2,000-mile journey without tinkering, Noles writes.
The first diesel engines were also “breathtaking works of art,” he notes, shaped by the era’s finest industrial designers. On the Orange Blossom Special, bright stripes of orange and green accented the gleaming silver.”
I sure wish I could have seen that train. It’s long gone, but I can still learn about it and more railfan topics at the Central Florida Railroad Museum, 101 S. Boyd St. in Winter Garden. It’s open Tuesday through Saturday, 11 a.m. to 3 p.m. Admission is free and docents are available to answer questions. For more information, visit cfrhs.org or call 407-6560559. To tell the museum’s story, the Central Florida Railroad Society has published “The Tavares & Gulf Legacy: A World-Class Museum,” by Phil Cross and Rich Cronin. Copies are available at the museum.